Obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control.
– Bayo Akomolafe
At first I saw you everywhere.
Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
– Louise Glück
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
– Rebecca Solnit
Here in America we the people have a continent on which to work out our destiny, and our faith is great that our men and women are fit to face the mighty days. Nowhere else in all the world is there such a chance for the triumph on a gigantic scale of the great cause of Democratic and popular government. If we fail, the failure will be lamentable, and our heads will be bowed with shame; for not only shall we fail for ourselves, but our failure will wreck the fond desires of all throughout the world who look toward us with the fond hope that here in this great Republic it shall be proved from ocean to ocean that the people can rule themselves, and thus ruling can gain liberty for and do justice both to themselves and to others. We who stand for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind are pledged to eternal war against wrong whether by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob. We believe that this country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in. The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice to all in the present. Our cause is the cause of justice for all in the interest of all.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Power resides only where men believe it resides. […] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
– George R.R. Martin
A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.
– Dante
Evening was coming and with it the soft, harping rain, rustling, rustling. A bird was muttering liquidly, gently somewhere, and it was very like the night – kind, strange.
– Henry Green
Science, like any tool, is neutral in morality. Its impact depends on the hands that wield it — whether for healing or harm, enlightenment or destruction.
– Carl Sagan
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
– Laini Taylor
It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.
– R Buckminster Fuller
Here’s a counter to the piece I shared about students not being able to stay focused on long complex pieces of reading (and while blaming the young is a very popular habit going back generations and centuries, I’ll note that on this site are way too m many not young people who are too eager to reply to read the post or the link and generally are as habituated to hot-take thoughtlessness as anyone, and that a while back when I was doing some research I was interested to find that a lot of young people complained that it was their parents who were addicted to their phones to the detriment of their capacity to pay attention to their children). Andy Black writes:
To be clear: the reason I have hope for the future is because of the students I taught in the last few years.
First, about my generation: I was fourteen when Guns n’ Roses released Use Your Illusion volumes one and two. A brash Joe Piscopo had made the transition from Saturday Night Live to sometimes movie-actor to stand-up built around body-building. Bel-Air had a new Prince, a Fresh one, whose royalty was complicated by the denizens of his kingdom making him take a cab from the airport to his new throne. Ritalin was on the cover of Time Magazine when I was fifteen because kids couldn’t pay attention.
My generation graduated high school in the mid-1990s and those of us who finished college did so just before or after 2000. I can assure you we were facing equal condemnations from professors: they were just more anecdotal, yet they were grounding assumptions: we didn’t read, we didn’t know how to write, we were lazy and entitled and too enamored with technology (like video games). The online avenues were just emerging where these might be argued with more permanence. But no boomer was talking about how my generation gave them hope for the future.
Yet there were books: Illiterate America (1985), The Closing of the American Mind (1987), or The End of Education (1995). Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich talked about this constantly, as did William Bennett. Mostly it seemed to happen in faculty lounges or happy hours, and such conclusions would be reported back to us students in class when a teacher or professor was profoundly disappointed in (in-class, on-paper) reading quiz results over books we apparently did not read. “Don’t you know what they’re saying about you?” one professor asked. We weren’t sure what he was referring to.
And this inspired policy both local and national, but really what this discourse helped foster was an attitude that wasn’t any more new than it is now. You can read some wild quotes about “the youth” on this fun reddit post. Read Horace on the wasteful “beardless youth” in Ars Poetica 2500 years ago. “My Students Can’t Read” is just a rehearsal of the texts listed above, and they turned college teaching committee meetings intto forums for anecdotal complaints about students who, again, can’t and won’t read. In 1995 or 1998 or 2002. Or for Horace, sometime between 30 and 20 BC, probably.
But us 90s kids weren’t as bad as the generation that followed (high-five, Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites!) In 2004, the NEH produced Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America finding a culprit that prior authors couldn’t have considered because of emergent technology: screens. “The news in the report is dire,” wrote its chairman, poet Dana Gioia. Print culture, also lamented above by our current author:
“affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.”
…My byline is this: I have taught at Murray State University for 13 years, after teaching as a graduate student at the Universities of Memphis and Maryland for about 5 years, after teaching at a small high school for 7 years. But here, I focus primarily on the students who I have encountered over the last few years at Murray State, because they’re the ones he (and the readers who share his article, and The Chronicle of Higher Education) seems most alarmed by.
These students mostly attended rural public schools in areas that carpetbaggers like me who move here never heard of before: Christian County, Graves County, Marshall County, Trigg County, McCracken County, or Calloway County, where Murray, Kentucky rests. Many of our students are from areas in similar rural places in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and my home state of Tennessee. Some are from more metropolitan spots – St. Louis, Louisville, Lexington, Nashville – and last year I had a delightful student from Sacramento. As such, you might assume that I could say to the author of “My Students Can’t Read:” You don’t know how good you got it, buddy. But I don’t: I want this guy to meet my students.
My students choose Murray State because it is fairly local, because it offers an avenue to a hopeful future at a reasonable cost, and because it is a respectable if not elite university. While many live on campus, a lot of my students live at home and have at least a thirty minute commute. Students would have to have very low-test scores in order not to be admitted, but even those students are entered into programs that pave the way for their acceptance. Because I teach four classes a semester, a fairly high number for a tenured college professor who also does service and research, I encounter students at all stages – seniors graduating with English degrees as well as non-majors who take my introductory writing and humanities classes.
Like him – I’ve had more than a few students who commit acts of academic dishonesty or do not complete coursework or do not follow instructions. I have students who do not find my classes valuable, interesting, or necessary. I’ll echo him and pretty much everyone else that AI has exacerbated the problem: people who do not like certain kinds of academic learning often see AI as the promise to easier positive outcomes in their courses.
But overwhelmingly, my experiences are so positive that, again, the reason I have hope for the future is because of the students I taught in the last few years.
How can I describe this? To start, students do the reading. I taught a Shakespeare class last year for upper-level students. I gave them two weeks to read each play, answer essay questions, turn in reading notes, and take an online multiple-choice quiz. The essay questions asked them to dive deep into the language and combine their reactions (often anger at a protagonist like Hamlet or Juliet’s dad or Leontes from The Winter’s Tale) with critical commentary. They read research which they adapted into visual “cheat sheets.” My favorite days were when I allowed them to use Discord, basically a chat-room they sign up for that I’ve used to create back-channel conversations over readings (and Discord is not without problems), to post memes and chatter as we were discussing the text. With computers and phones out, they weren’t distracted; they were more engaged; or when they were distracted it was because some student had posted the perfect meme that would stoke the discussion and we needed to f-ing applaud it.
I know: William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley are rolling over in their graves. The Cambridge Dons from Chariots of Fireplayed by John Gielgud and Lindsay Andersonare not amused by my students’ constant Muppet-centered comparisons to, for instance, Measure for Measure’s Lucio. But I think if you’d seen the class, you’d see 25 or so students engaging more deeply about Shakespeare than I ever did in my undergraduate class on the same subject. You want to argue this was kindergarten-level stuff? Fine, I’ll show you their final papers.
It’s not just that: it’s that I’ve tried to think more like them in finding ways to register student responses to texts that allow them to use creativity rather than more formal analysis. Two years ago, I taught a Women’s Literature class full of 300+ page texts where students turned in “Table of Contents” – writing down quotes, offering commentary, scribbling a high-five to the author for the perfect simile, or wondering why the hell the luminous Margaret Cavendish didn’t trust in microscopes. I would ask the students to keep these “ToCs” during their reading for the week and turn them in the night before class, and my class prep was just reading and taking notes on their notes so I could prepare for class.
It was wonderful and every time I taught the class there was nowhere else I wanted to be. I recently told a group of students, “The happiest I am is when I’m talking to a class about a piece of literature that I have opinions about, and get to hear theirs”
– Rebecca Solnit
Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimization of the expanding political power which absorbs all spheres of culture.
– Herbert Marcuse
Decipher me, my love, or
I will be forced to
destroy you.
– Clarice Lispector
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
– Frank Zappa
The more it appears to be spiritual—that is to say, something different from, aside from, apart from everyday life—the more false that kind of spirituality will be.
– Alan Watts
It is said that love is blind. But is it? Actually nothing on earth is as clear-sighted as love. The thing that is blind is not love but attachment.
– Anthony de Mello
The word “myth” comes from the ancient word “mythos” meaning word. Both ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’ mean ‘word’. While logos refers to rational thinking, mythos describes poetic or intuitive thinking.
– Mariann Burke
My faith fills my solitude with its hushed whisper of invisible life.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Only pure melancholy is left. I want nothing. Sleep.
Only to sleep. And to dream. To dream I am loved.
– Alejandra Pizarnik. Diarios
Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
I’d woken up early, and I took
a long time getting ready to exist.
– Fernando Pessoa
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
– GWF Hegel
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
– Abraham Lincoln
The problem of pain is that I
cannot feel my father’s, and he
cannot feel mine. This, I
suppose, is also the essential
mercy of pain.
– Eula Biss
When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling…
– Foucault
whether understanding ever satisfies anything other than the ego, ever gratifies us in any other way than by allowing us to believe we are the kind of people who can understand, the kind of people who are understanding.
– Bruce Fink
To forgive doesn’t mean to say, “I forgive you,” but to tear from your heart every reproach and shred of anger against the person who hurt you.
– Leo Tolstoy
One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain – rigor and recklessness – simultaneously.
– Carole Maso
The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
….
Every separation is a link.
– Simone Weil
The body
is not a prison,
but a chapel of breath.
– @BashoSociety
Once you understand that indulging might actually be worse than resisting, the urge begins to lose its appeal.
– @dailystoic
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
– Anaïs Nin
Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling,
or the absence of it.
– Margaret Atwood
Learn the art of forgiving.
Apply it to yourself first,
Then it becomes easy
To forgive others.
– Sri Chinmoy
I urge you: Come be angry at
a nearer distance.
– Cardan Greenbriar
People will mistake your high sense of self with arrogance. You can travel to the ends of your own reality to know yourself but if you come back full of life and self understanding, it’ll be too much for those who’ve not taken the first steps towards their own inner exploration.
– Nika Solé
How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
– Janet Fitch
Since your mind is permeated by an unborn luminosity,
Do practice unceasingly!
– Padmasambhava
Meditaional therapy is the highest of all therapies, provided it is prescribed systematically. Gradually aspirants learn to deal with their problems, fears, and habit patterns.
– Swami Rama
Hope tends to appear when we see that all sorts of disparate personalities can come together, no matter how different and jarring they may seem at first.
– Anne Lamott
If all goes well, I shall disappear for some time and there will be no way to get
hold of me.
– Hermann Hesse
We make each other
alive. Does it matter if it
hurts?
– Ingmar Bergman
All mouth. Out of orbit
due to an insatiable need to be
orbited. At some point there are clouds
– Nathan Spoon
i love talking to you,
even though i have
nothing to say.
– mahmoud darwish
The Buddha called it dukkha. No matter where you go, unhappiness follows, until you awaken.
– Eckhart Tolle
You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
– Patrick Ness
Feel it. The thing that you don’t want
to feel. Feel it, and be free.
– Nayyirah Waheed
People write because
no one listens.
– h.h.
You are not a broken brain trying to heal. You are wholeness trying to remember itself.
– Kimia Nora
Hope is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
A hard thunder broke my sleep.
As if roused by a god,
I stood straight up;
my rested eyes moved about,
seeking acquaintance
with place.
– Dante
Revolutionary or reformer — the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world.
– Fernando Pessoa
When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world – profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.
– Ingmar Bergman
It is up to us to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
– Sir David Attenborough
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
– Leo Tolstoy
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.
– Vaclav Havel
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.
– Oscar Wilde
I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
– Anne Sexton
The immutable neither lives
nor dies; it is the timeless
witness of life and death.
You cannot call it dead, for
it is aware. Nor can you
call it alive, for it does
not change.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.
– Proverbs 25:26
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
– John Ashbery
We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
– Tennessee William
The seeker of union
Must admit separation.
For the knower of union,
There is nothing to do.
– Wu Hsin
You didn’t come here to play the game.
You came here to change the entire game
board.
Start using your Heart and let your mind rest in Peace.
– Eileen Lynn
A truly revolutionary mindfulness would challenge the Western sense of entitlement to happiness irrespective of ethical conduct.
– Ron Purser
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.
– John Ashbery
Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I had to return to the
darkness, I couldn’t
stand the sun,
– Franz Kafka
Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.
– Charles Kettering
Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.
– Octavia Butler
Take time to do things differently. Slow down, absorb the world in a new manner. Change the color of your footsteps. You may just find a bit more life than you knew of before. After all, life is an open sky. You can always fly back home.
– J. Wool
wonder turns
even ordinary roads
into sacred ground
– @BashoSociety
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience
– T. S. Eliot
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may perhaps be the very best thing about it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
– Christopher Hitchens
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the greatest possible degree.
– Ezra Pound
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness… and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
– Alfred North Whitehead
western clouds
holding the day
a moment longer
– Aiko
all my life
I expect no grand bouquet
yet wish for
someone to greet me
with a single flower
– Kiyoko Ogawa
With books unread, muscles untrained, and thousands of skills untouched – if you’re bored, you’re not even trying.
– @bluewmist
Children are expected to have a level of self-control that’s rarely seen in police, politicians, pastors, billionaires, and the president.
– J.S. Park
I had a profound desire to be alone, because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognize things.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
It is not obedience that is the ultimate virtue, but humanity.
– Erich Maria Remarque
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast…
– W.H. Auden
I have had good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people.
– Sigmund Freud
If you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
– C.S. Lewis
We move thru life in a
continual search
How can it be better?
Whatever it may be.
– Rick Rubin
A body that doesn’t brace itself against its breath starts feeling palpably lighter. Breath after breath, it sheds its resistant burden.
– Will Johnson
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
– Hermann Hesse
O Spirit, teach us to heal the body by recharging it with Thy cosmic energy, to heal the mind by concentration and cheerfulness, and to heal the disease of soul ignorance by the divine medicine of meditation on Thee.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books…
– Erich Maria Remarque
each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.
– Charles Bukowski
Psychoanalysis is a theory of original frustration. And everything depends on this story, on what you do with your frustration. Another way of saying this would be, psychoanalysis is an education in transforming and bearing frustration.
– Adam Philips
You will be forgotten either
way. So live in such a manner
that, while you remain, you
belong to yourself.
– Marcus Aurelius
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A chosen person can be thrown into a pit, sold out, forgotten, and falsely accused and still end up in the palace.
– Nithya Shri
Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in after life the images first presented to it.
– Samuel Smiles
Meaning is a tool — a means. Absolute meaning would be means and end at the same time. Thus every thing is itself the means whereby we can come to know it — to experience it or have an effect on it. Thus in order to feel and come to know a thing completely I would have to make it my meaning and object at once — I would have to vivify it — make it into absolute meaning, according to the earlier definition.
– Novalis
If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
– Octavia Butler
Instead of worrying that humanities degrees don’t prepare students for jobs in today’s world [product managers, finance consultants, startups], we should worry that we’ve created a world with such little value for literature, art, philosophy—anything that expresses the human soul.
– Priya Satia
If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people.
– Zadie Smith
I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can’t be quite senseless because you are aware that it’s senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?
– Charles Bukowski
The person who realizes that hatred is an enemy … and who persistently strikes it down, is happy in this world and the next.
– Śāntideva
Woman is the heart of humanity … its grace, ornament, and solace.
– Samuel Smiles
What’s worse than the fact that people no longer seem to know anything is that they don’t want to know anything; and the rest of us are supposed to accommodate them by speaking only in monosyllables.
– Boze Herrington
Every person carries a solution hidden within them; responsibility begins when they choose to uncover it.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
– Donna Tartt
…we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up a while, watch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.
– Chloe Dalton
The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
– Samuel Smiles
People say there’s no magic in books but the fact that you can string words together to create a series of visions in someone else’s brain is still our greatest achievement as a species.
– Boze Herrington
Every generation is waiting for someone brave enough to release the gift hidden inside them.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
– Ian McEwan
Stupidity has a knack
of getting its way.
– Albert Camus
I think many writers, artists, poets are permanently in love; they yearn and they love. But the world doesn’t always reciprocate.
– Joyce Carol Oates
I want to go nothing less than
to the very bottom.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
– Wendell Berry
A closed book can never change a life; wisdom only transforms those willing to seek, read, and understand it.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Your gift is not a reward for humanity; it is your debt to humanity.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man can clothe himself, the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired.
– Samuel Smiles
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.
– Samuel Smiles
Woman, above all other educators, educates humanly. Man is the brain, but woman is the heart, of humanity.
– Samuel Smiles
The easiest way to not be photographed with fascists is to not go to places where fascists coagulate.
– W. Kamau Bell
It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.
– Samuel Smiles
What does he know of love who has not lost what he truly loved!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into rottenness.
– Samuel Smiles
Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
– Samuel Smiles
Progress however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
– Samuel Smiles
The ultimate choice for a man inasmuch as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate.
– Erich Fromm
You do not have to carry yesterday’s weight into tomorrow’s possibilities.
– Dede Hawkins
There is a reason a book has weight in your hands. It asks you to slow down, to hold it, to turn a page with intention. A screen weighs nothing and asks nothing of you — which is exactly why it gives so little back. I think the things that ask something of us are the things that end up meaning the most.
– John Green
Reading is an act of civilization.
– Italo Calvino
Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.
– Samuel Smiles
If we think of all the great works of poetry and prose that dilate a day or an instant into an eon, or compress whole eras into a nutshell, or run time backwards, or find some position where time can be spatialized and we can see, all at once, as Yeats writes, “what is past, or passing, or to come,” we arrive at one of the appropriate emotions for this moment, which is anger. (Another emotion, grief, is waiting close by.)
– Dan Chiasson
Karma Yogis abandon the intellect of attachment and perform actions through the senses, mind, intellect, and body, abandoning attachment, solely for the purification of the heart.
– Bhagavad Gita
Bitterness is like cancer: it feeds on the host, but it doesn’t nothing to the object of its displeasure.
– Maya Angelou
Are we not all a thousand characters in millions of plays throughout our lifetime?
– Sherrilyn Kenyon
You already are extremely incredibly successful at something but because it’s easy for you and natural for you, you don’t think it’s a skill.
– Jay Shetty
You saw her a hundred times, but not once did you look at her.
– Gabriela Mistral
We need a Democratic party with backbone.
– Mayor Mamdani
Our senses exist mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds’ best guesses as to what we’re experiencing.
– Michael Pollan
Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.
– Henry Clay
Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
– Stephen Hawking
A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that progress means advances in tech. Real progress is kids who are literate, free meals for public school students, a culture in which human art & poetry are celebrated. We’re regressing rapidly & the only way forward is to read.
– Boze Herrington
We don’t read the poets to understand the moment. We read poets to understand ourselves.. .The purpose of the state is to numb the senses. The purpose of a lyric poet is to wake them up.
– Ilya Kaminsky
In the end, what matters more? Living, or knowing that one is living?
– Clarice Lispector
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs.
– Socrates
But now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.
– Lois Lowry
The boy was as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.
– Earl Pitts
The earth must be a huge bus station where the pathways of various civilizations criss cross. We’re simply to take what we need for our journey and keep walking the cosmic path that was sealed in the stars before we got here. We did not just get here from nowhere, but surely we we meant to pass this way.
– Marjorie Bee
You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know.
– Janet Fitch
Our perception is bounded only by the limits we set in our minds.
– Leaven Stark
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
– Shakespeare
I’ve spent my entire life studying atoms and molecules, but I’m sorry to tell you, they don’t exist; they are expressions of CONSCIOUSNESS.
– Max Plunk
If you’re neurodivergent, be grateful it hasn’t progressed to its more advanced stages: neuroinsurgent, followed by neuroallegiant.
– Kat Angus
One must not wish
first to understand
and then to feel.
Art does not
tolerate reason.
– Albert Camus
On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.
– Octavia Butler
Who among us has not dreamt, in
moments of ambition, of the
miracle of a poetic prose, musical
without rhythm and rhyme,
supple and staccato enough to
adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the
soul, the undulations of dreams,
and sudden leaps of
consciousness. This obsessive idea
is above all a child of giant cities,
of the intersecting of their myriad
relations.
– Baudelaire
A tree is like a human being. It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things.
– André Desrocher
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
– Clive Davis
Clive was the one suit we weren’t distrustful of.
– Bob Weir
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
– G. K. Chesterton
Profound connection is what the word `spiritual’ properly refers to. The spiritual is not a matter of visions of angels, or of being carried away by ecstatic emotion… At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience of the connectedness that underlies reality.
– Arthur J. Deikman, M.D.
Who is so deafe, or so blynde, as is hee, that wilfully will nother heare nor see.
– John Heywood
The universe speaks in patterns.
The heart recognizes them
before the mind understands them.
– Nagomi
Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t want a membership to.
– Colleen Hoover
The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change.
– Richard Bach
I honor Lenin as a man who completely sacrificed himself and devoted all his energy to the realization of social justice. Men of his type are the guardians and restorers of the conscience of humanity.
– Albert Einstein
the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. the exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
– Wallace Stevens
It is the nature of all hypocrites and false prophets to create a conscience where there is none, and to cause conscience to disappear where it does exist.
– Martin Luther
Live for yourself and you will live in vain; live for others, and you will live again.
– Bob Marley
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
What if I don’t want to wake up before dawn and work until midnight just so I can look at money pouring into a bank account I never have the time to use?
What if I’ve no interest in living the sort of life my foremothers sought so desperately to escape from?
What if spending all my money on a nice, grey flat then never leaving it in the evening is my own idea of hell?
– Marie Le Conte
Paradise is beyond desire.
– Swami Nitty-Gritty
“Para” is Greek for beyond.
Desire is not the issue. ATTACHMENT is the issue.
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ancients called it the Akashic Records.
A cosmic library
written in energy.
there was the field.
– Nagomi
With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow – I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.
– Confucius
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
– Christopher Morley
Not exaggerating when I say the future of our world depends on people recovering the ability to spend an unbroken hour or two reading a book without being tempted to look at their phones.
– Boze Herrington
How under all these circumstances could I possibly perceive the good in what comes about? I can’t even see *what* comes about, since each end (synthesis) is the new thesis against which a further antithesis appears. The becoming never ceases — there are syntheses but never a true end.
– Philip K. Dick
I know, in a visionary way,
that I will die of poetry.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Rules may look boring, but they are there in every novel and painting. They keep things whole.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
And to live life well you need to know when to ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Words convey meaning only at a certain level; they have a way of distorting, of not giving fully the significance of their symbol, of creating a deception that is entirely unintentional.
– Krishnamurti
We find total peace when we accept that, due to our karma, we deserve the good and the bad that is happening in our lives.
– Mitta Xinindlu
It is a broken Christianity that swears it can see God in presidents and billionaires but not in the poor and the powerless.
– Rev. Benjamin Cremer
The whole philosophy of art is that you don’t try to be artistic but you just approach the objects as they are, and then the message comes automatically.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Time and reflection change the sight little by little ’till we come to understand.
– Paul Cezanne
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
– Bill Watterson
And what if there is nothing else? What if all life ends in the silent void of death? Then is it all in vain? I think not, for love, for the sake of love, will always be enough. And if our lives are but a single flash in the dark hollow of eternity, then if, but for the briefest of moments, we shine – then how brilliantly our light has burned. And as starlight knows no boundary of space or time, so too, our illumination will shine forth throughout all eternity, for darkness has no power to quell such light. And this is a lesson we must all learn and take to heart – that all light is eternal and all love is light. And it must forever be so.
– Richard Paul Evans
Every act of love is a new beginning, a new creation. To live compassionately is to believe in a love greater than ourselves yet intimately present to us, a love visible in the trees, the streams, the clouds, the poor, nonbelievers, and all who share the life that is our life—a love binding us together without constraints. We must believe that each person is capable of being transformed by love, that each tree, flower, animal, living creature, the stones, the sand, the sky—everything is capable of being transformed by love. And that when all is united by a luminous thread of love, Christ will be visible in the universe.
– Ilia Delio
There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday
I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry.
It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time.
The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes
with “the glory and freshness of a dream.” The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught
suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like
visitations from another world. But it was not only my senses
that were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion
in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began
to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it
with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that
comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost
unfathomable mystery.
The song of the birds, the shape
of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs
of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.”
– Bede Griffiths
‘To dream is to know,’ I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is poised on various kinds of precarity, the substance of visions is as real as the earth, the air, the water. It is not easy to situate oneself, if even for brief moments, on the other side of time, the other side of somewhere […].
– Carter Mathes
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
– Salman Rushdie
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible….
– Thomas Pynchon
…and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.
– Isak Dinesen
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less.
– Nicole Krauss
There is no such thing as a normal person. There is just you and me.
– Willie Nelson
…huge breath-held, candle-lit, whistling, planet-wide, still blood-flowing, howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of the human…
– Jorie Graham
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
– Annie Dillard
Those who love life do not actually love life but love loving.
– Luca Dellanna
… That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
– David Foster Wallace
I can only understand what’s broken and intense
– Arthur Rimbaud
It is the nature of the visible to have an invisible lining that it makes present like an absence.
– Maurice Merlau-Ponty
If you are smart, you would benefit from more silence instead of reading more books. Too much information leads to overthinking.
– Kieran Drew
You don’t read books to obtain “information.” You read books to withdraw from the “information” machine. As David Ulin once said: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.”
– Poetic Outlaws
Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Zwijgen
by Saskia Hamilton
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
– Jacques Barzun
There is no sense talking about “being true to yourself” until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.
– Marion Woodman
Let your language be for you what the body is for lovers. It alone separates beings and unite them.
– Motto of literary magazine founded by Schiller and Goethe
All of the difficulties in life are our perfect teacher. We learn, grow and become wise knowing what we need to do to live the life we deeply desire.
– Barb Schmidt
We have no right to tell our children how to build their future, since we have proved unfit to build our own…We cannot hope to build independent human characters if education is in the hands of politicians.
– Wilhelm Reich
The body itself is a disease. To wish for a long stay of that disease is not the aim of the jnani [one who has realized the Self].
– Ramana Maharshi
The negotiation of desire that constitutes one’s life flourishes when tended by another’s restraint.
– Muriel Dimen
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then
a pause.
– Margaret Atwood
…writing to you. It is like kissing
you. It is something physical;
– Simone de Beauvoir
death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.
– Charles Bukowski
As far as society is concerned the poet has died and the only one who doesn’t know it is the poet himself. Because of his great vanity or because he has formed a bad habit like masturbation which he finds enjoyable and can’t quit.
– Irving Layton
Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.
– David L. Ulin
The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children together and teach them through the head.
It causes absolute starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at all…
Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can’t do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal.
– D.H. Lawrence
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
– Willa Cather
Desire—
The word has not yet been invented
– Marguerite Duras
… but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?
– Henry James
But I want to be better than the lessons they
taught me. I want my love to be greater than my
hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.
– Amy Engel
If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
– Terry Eagleton
Whatever organ ceases to know pain,—whatever faculty ceases to be used under the stimulus of pain,—must also cease to exist. Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic shapelessness, thereafter into dust.
– Lafcadio Hearn
Clear water sparkles like crystal,
you can see through right to the bottom.
Mind free from all thoughts.
– Han-Shan
As always, books remain a consolation—these light little ships for traveling through time and space and beyond their limits. As long as there is a book at hand and leisure for reading, the situation cannot be hopeless, not utterly unfree.
– Ernst Jünger
I have dined so well at the banquet of respect that shame no longer persecutes me
– Muriel Dimen
One should always be kind, Lise says, in case it might be the last chance. One might be killed crossing the street, or even on the pavement, any time, you never know. So we should always be kind.
– Muriel Spark
In effing the ineffable, language fails, has to fail, should fail, and should go on failing, loquaciously failing. Failure is the aim, an apparently aimless aim, which shoots at a target it cannot see, cannot know, and cannot even conceive.
– Simon Critchley
Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit. Don’t you feel that?
– Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
For resentments of any nature bring their fruit in the physical.
– Edgar Cayce
You have been listening to the inner roommate your whole life. But there has always been someone watching. That witness – quiet, unchanged – is who you are.
– Michael Singer
Self-pity is not the same thing as self-compassion. Self-compassion says, ‘May you be well,’ and it reduces our suffering. Self-pity says, ‘Poor me, this is terrible,’ and increases our suffering.
– Bodhipaksa
Angry, and half in
love with you, and
tremendously sorry, I
turned away.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I always feel that a man and a woman who do not like the same films will eventually divorce.
– Jean-Luc Godard
She stands in the afternoon sunlight, imagining catastrophes again.
– josefine klougart
If you seek the applause of your contemporaries, you are writing your thoughts on water; if you seek the truth, you must be prepared to stand in the freezing wind of their absolute indifference.
– G.W.F. Hegel
I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation, our appearance in the world, should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products, of three thousand million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man’s side in a trance.
– Sir David Attenborough
You are always my concern, I ponder a great deal on it and speak to you and take your strange, dark head between my hands and want to push the stones off your chest…
– Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Cela
If you have loved, if you have been loved, you will know in old age that that was the true and powerful bond that tied you to life, the only one that deserves to be remembered.
– Juan Marsé
I’ve always been able to work with anybody that doesn’t want success. Jazz musicians don’t want success. They have these little tin weapons – they don’t shoot….The jazz musician doesn’t deal with the structured life – he just wants that night, like a kid.
– John Cassavetes
I’m tired of trying to fill up my
empty spaces with things I don’t
need and people I don’t like.
– Beau Taplin
Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.
– Isaac Asimov
Emotions are a centerpiece of our moral philosophy. Substantive ethics theories require deep understanding of our emotions.
– Martha Nussbaum
Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.
– James Joyce
The God of Patriarchy, from the beginning, has been a God of War and Economic Exploitation; incessant warfare and economic exploitation have characterized the four-thousand-year history of this male God —a timespan that is very brief relative to the 300,000 to 500,000 years of humanoid life on earth, but still long enough to make us feel, as a species, that “it has always been this way.”
– Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are made by that sort of suffering.
– Hemingway
We’ve tried, but it seems it is in the stars for us to hate each other.
– Austin Smith
Knowledge without repentance—will be but a torch to light men to Hell.
– Thomas Watson
We are a people that like to be entertained and don’t like to sit down and think. So, there’s a drift to entertain people and not to teach them.
– John MacArthur
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.
– Ernest Hemingway
I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward. I determined never to stop until I had come to the end and achieved my purpose.
– David Livingstone
There are things in your soul and in mine that need to meet.
– Antonin Artaud
To pray means to stop expecting from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself.
– Henri Nouwen
A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.
– James Dent
There are unforgettable people, and there is no cure for that.
– Charles Bukowski
No matter what you are going through, spend a few minutes each day to be grateful for who you still have, and for what you still have, in your Life.
– Avis Viswanathan
Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.
– Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire
I find one vast garden spread out, all over the universe.
All plants, all human beings are about in this garden in various ways.
Each has their own uniqueness and beauty.
Their presence and variety give me great delight.
Every one of you adds with your special feature to the glory of the garden.
– Anandamayi Ma
Justice
the bird comes
and devours the worm;
the man comes
and devours the bird;
the worm comes
and devours the man.
– Blanca Varela
As we talked I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.
– Elena Ferrante
The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
– William James
Let us, therefore, not be weary of well-doing; for we shall reap an eternal harvest of comfort, if we faint not.
– George Whitefield
Cut vegetables in triangles if you want people to eat more. Cut them in spheres if you want them to eat less.
– Swami Nitty-Gritty
Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.
– Tracy Morgan
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
– Norman Cousins
I have found the Friend in the eyes of the poor and the broken.
– Kabir
People simply
love or do not love.
Those who love will always do so—
at every moment,
intensely and passionately.
Those who do not love will never rise
even a centimeter off the ground.
Gray men and women, devoid of blood.
– Chavela Vargas
Sometimes everything you need isn’t so far from where you start.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
The truly sociable man is more difficult in his relationships than others; those which consist only in false appearances cannot suit him. He prefers to live far from wicked men without thinking about them, than to see them and hate them.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues
I think the trouble with life is we do things because we should. We act for outside eyes. I’m trying to live it the other way round. To do what feels right deep down even if it shouldn’t be.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Hecato says, ‘I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell-if you would be loved, love.’
– Seneca
I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.
– Paul Harding, Enon
As James Hillman said, “tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are.” We are what we long for.
– Mary Antonia Wood, The Archetypal Artist
A poet is always tricking himself into new discoveries.
– Richie Hofman
Calling yourself an AI musician is like saying you’re a microwave chef.
– Todd Poore
There are many days I thirst for my own silence but walk through the desert screaming instead.
– Andrea Gibson
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Deities and Gods have no place in the Self. Neither paradise nor heaven exists there.
– Avadhuta Gita
Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.
– Peter Brooks
I find most interesting the conspiracy of life in the desert to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun. The beaten earth appears defeated and dead, but it only appears so…the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.
– David Fideler
Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on.
– Ilia Delio
With this new sense of moving forward, from simple to complex life forms, from bacteria to humans, science shows that evolution is more than a method of collecting and classifying the facts of life; rather it is the means by which humanity can move forward into the future.
– Ilia Delio
In my own effort towards concentration, help is also offered through nature itself, life itself—whenever I can remain permeable to the deeply revealing impressions that it never ceases to provide. Therefore, my only concern should be to try and stay attentive to the wordless call from that which is always there, waiting for recognition.
– Henri Tracol
However, this is a magical operation in the sense of the wisdom of the Kabbala, namely that it arises not from magic, but from nature taking its natural and subtle course.
– Paracelsus
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.
– George Saunders
One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with That Which Is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure And Thus Perfect Nation–and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.
I know this. But still I’m full of desire…
– George Saunders
If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
– Schopenhauer
Above all, tell them to practice an intimate presence to the beauty and wonder of the natural world through their intuitive awareness that recognizes the oneness of all life; tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them – the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset. Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.
– Thomas Berry
The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection ‘frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero’s birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.’ The real psychic purpose of the conventional man’s affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self. The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.
– Murray B. Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer… .
– Richard Powers
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
– Richard Powers
Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written and find that it’s all worthless … What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.
– Fernando Pessoa
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
– Nicole Krauss
humid night
sheets twisted
like questions
– Sakura
Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I’d prefer a traveling salesman.
– Walker Percy
You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will
crush you. And you’re still going to love all of
it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?
– Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
If you keep awake always to the Self, which is the substratum of all experiences, you will find that the world which you are now aware of is just as unreal as the world in which you lived in your dream.
– Ramana Maharshi
The world belongs to those who refuse to disappear.
– Ghassan Kanafani
The first great thing is to find yourself and for that you need solitude and contemplation – at least sometimes. I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.
– Fridtjof Nansen
I see you my planet, I see your exact rotation now on my floor—I will not close these eyes in this my planet…
I don’t want the moon and the stars, I want to lie here arms spread on your almost eternal turn and on the matter the turn takes-on as it is turned by that matter—Earth—as my mind lags yet is always on you,
how huge you carrying me are—and there is never hurry— and nothing will posit you as you carry the positors—as you carry the bottom of the river and its top and the clouds on its top, watery, weak, and the clouds one looks up to to see as they too turn—
– Jorie Graham
To “look with the eyes of love” seems a vague and sentimental recommendation; yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness, without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen… The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfigurating results of hate, rivalry, prejudice vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you — new music, new color, new light are poured from the outward world.
– Evelyn Underhill
Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter.” This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.
The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality. Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.
– Henry Corbin
A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it’s not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Anger vitalizes people; it also temporarily narrows the range of vision. Anger burns through certain husks of apathy like white-hot fire through steel; it does not encourage grief, nor the examination of one’s own shadow.
– Robert Bly
Lorca
after Neruda
Because I was a poem, my country
hushed me.
They knelt me
on the cold stones of a roadway
and even when the guns had touched
my body,
I heard the birds, I heard my heart
be strong.
Listen. You have to go on
without me.
You know what my triumph was,
my victory?
I was open. I stayed
so wholly open
that I heard the birds and the gift
the Spring is singing.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
– Joseph Fasano
Shakespearean Haiku
Shall I compare thee
To a summer’s day? Alright –
Thou art very hot.
– Brian Bilston
The Dream Play
What night-rule now about this haunted grove?
The spirits have dispersed, the woods
faded to grey from midnight blue
leaving a powdery residue,
night music fainter, frivolous gods
withdrawing, cries of yin and yang,
discords of the bionic young;
cobweb and insects, hares and deer,
wild strawberries and eglantine,
dawn silence of the biosphere,
amid the branches a torn wing
— what is this enchanted place?
Not the strict groves of academe
but an old thicket of lost time
too cool for school, recovered space
where the brain yields to nose and ear,
folk remedy and herbal cure,
old narratives of heart and hand,
and a dazed donkey, starry eyed,
with pearls and honeysuckle crowned,
beside her naked nibs is laid.
Wild viruses, Elysian fields —
our own planet lit by the fire
of molten substance, constant flux,
hot ice and acrobatic sex,
the electric moth-touch of desire
and a new vision, a new regime
where the white blaze of physics yields
to yellow moonlight, dance and dream
induced by what mind-altering drug
or rough-cast magic realism;
till morning bright with ant and bug
shines in a mist of glistening gism,
shifting identities, mutant forms,
angels evolved from snails and worms.
– Derek Mahon
Afterlives
(for James Simmons)
1
I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
Pigeons neck on the white
Roofs as I draw the curtains
And look out over London
Rain-fresh in the morning light.
This is our element, the bright
Reason on which we rely
For the long-term solutions.
The orators yap, and guns
Go off in a back street;
But the faith doesn’t die
That in our time these things
Will amaze the literate children
In their non-sectarian schools
And the dark places be
Ablaze with love and poetry
When the power of good prevails.
What middle-class shits we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.
2
I am going home by sea
For the first time in years.
Somebody thumbs a guitar
On the dark deck, while a gull
Dreams at the masthead,
The moon-splashed waves exult.
At dawn the ship trembles, turns
In a wide arc to back
Shuddering up the grey lough
Past lightship and buoy,
Slipway and dry dock
Where a naked bulb burns;
And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognize
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I’d stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
– Derek Mahon
Lives
(for Seamus Heaney)
First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.
That was fun
But they buried me
In the earth two thousand years
Till a laborer
Turned me up with a pick
In eighteen fifty-four.
Once I was an oar
But stuck in the shore
To mark the place of a grave
When the lost ship
Sailed away. I thought
Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.
The time that I liked
Best was when
I was a bump of clay
In a Navaho rug,
Put there to mitigate
The too god-like
Perfection of that
Merely human artifact.
I served my maker well —
He lived long
To be struck down in
Denver by an electric shock
The night the lights
Went out in Europe
Never to shine again.
So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,
A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker . . .
It all seems
A little unreal now,
Now that I am
An anthropologist
With my own
Credit card, dictaphone,
Army-surplus boots
And a whole boatload
Of photographic equipment.
I know too much
To be anything any more;
And if in the distant
Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,
Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.
– Derek Mahon
I have no patience
for people who can watch
the world burn and
never wonder:
How do I become rain?
– John Roedel
Remember to love yourself, to bow down to yourself, to worship yourself, because God dwells in you as you.
– Robert Adams
…words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.
– Owen Barfield
How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?
– Irvin D. Yalom
At the end of his life C. G. Jung (as we can see in his later letters) continually stressed that only if enough individuals would commit themselves totally to this search, each for his or her own inner truth, could the world avoid disaster. The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated.
– Helen M. Luke
I dreamed of a love such as no one could ever dream of, a love that was all of life, all of poetry.
– Alfonsina Storni, The Prayer
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
– Robert Frost
As the painter Tony Berlant observed, “The more personal and introspective a work of art is, the more universal it becomes.”
– James Hollis
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
– William James
I haunted, like a melancholic ghost, places I had known intimately in a previous life, and I felt essentially vulnerable, though I knew I was protected, if not by that invisibility or transparency specters can choose for themselves, by the fact that I had become unrecognizable.
– Matei Calinescu
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.
– Virginia Woolf
Is the thing ever ours we cannot keep?
– George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul
Counsel better do I know: that ye should honour the Prince of Glory and pray to the Lord of Life for His comfort, salvation, and victory, as ye take your road…in Him is courage, power, and valour.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The head only knows how to misunderstand. It is only the heart which knows how to understand. Love is the only way to know. Logic is a pretend. It only pretends that it knows, it befools you, it deceives you. It is only love that opens the eyes of knowing.
– Osho
how simple this passage through the gap between words.
– Matei Calinescu
I believe in the virtue of small numbers. The world will be saved by the few.
– Andrè Gide
No one has named me yet but, since it’s no use crying for the moon, I have resolved to remain for the rest of my life a nameless cat in the house of this teacher.
– Sōseki Natsume, (tr. Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson)
I’m a master of speaking silently. All my life I’ve spoken silently. I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.
– Dostoyevsky
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
– Carl Sagan
Cherry blossoms —
residents of this world
a short time.
– Issa Kobayashi
C.S. Lewis had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
That’s the good thing about being a tourist. We can pass through history on a boat lit up with little golden bulbs.
– Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
– Alain de Botton
quiet evening
nothing urgent
becomes everything
– Aiko
I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic.
– Harold Bloom
You can never see a candle in a fluorescently lit convenience-store. That’s why you have to get away from the world really to see any light.
– Pico Iyer
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.
– T.S. Eliot
I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.
– Jack Gilbert
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
– Roland Barthes
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
– Albert Einstein
I’m searching for a phrase that will release everything that’s pent up in me.
– Henry Miller
open window
freedom smells like
fresh rain.
– Aoi
Seek first for the truth, and the new will perhaps be given you besides.
– Henri de Lubac, More Paradoxes
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
– Brené Brown
Extreme clarity is a mystery.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It makes no sense to study everything in life, and still not know the one who is studying.
– Mooji
Peace begins when we end the war within—dismantling false identities and discovering the luminous truth of what is whole and free.
– Amoda Maa
summer moon
becoming fully
what already is
– Ogawa
The worst people you know are making bank every single day, while the healers, peace keepers, visionaries and those unwilling to sell their soul are all too often scraping by. What a world.
– Nika Solé
summer heat
even mystery
wears less
– Akari
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness
simply means being able to say to him,
“What are you going through?”
– Simone Weil
The ice-sheet sky above me is broken only by a hole too small
for you to pull me through.
– David Boose
Retreats can transform you. Traveling the world can transform you. But so can the right words from the right person at the right time. So can the perfect synchronistic line of events. So can the most mundane experience. It all depends on your willingness to transform.
– Nika Solé
Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
morning birds
tiny prophets
everywhere
– Akari
Song lyrics are the place where language goes straight from the ear to the heart in a kind of way. People need that immediacy. And they respond to it, too.
– Adrian Matejka
It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Society’s preconditioned habits and traditions are strong within us . . . Certainly there is some conventional wisdom, but most of it tells us how to create, live in and benefit from samsara – ignoring the fact that samsara itself is a big problem . . .
There are many wrong tracks in society, but they are all basically the same: They all take us outside of ourselves to satisfy our inner needs. Whether they take us toward material goods or toward social relationships and emotional codependence, they all ignore mind’s own potential to provide us with happiness and peace.
Unlike the cavemen, the great sages of the past sought and found independence from the preconditioned habits and traditions of society. They revolted against the great human tragedy of ignorant ego-mind and found the strength to harvest peace through looking directly at the mind. They spent their time in solitude, developing wakefulness and engaging in deep self-reflection. This unconventional path goes against the very grain of the consensus of conventional ancestors. Up to this point, most human beings have ignored the need to develop a path of wakefulness. This is the tragedy of ignorance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, It’s Up to You
short story (after Gorki)
The royals turn their backs
on the count.
The horses step back
leaving the way free
for Tolstoy to pass.
– Alec Finlay
Nothing, not a cracker, not a crumb. Still
a vague intimation shadows the memory of
this place, and others, that somewhere down
the pike these landscapes are waiting again,
or are, perhaps, the only things we take with us—
our psychic terrain—
as though through memory we create our own afterlives—
which can’t be the entire breadth of it all,
… but in some way a homeland,
a landscape out of which we might ramble into the afterlives, yes,
the memories, of one another…
– David Bottoms
Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
– Barry Lopez
Look to this Day, for it is Life – the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the truths and realities of your existence: the Bliss of Growth, the Glory of Action, the Splendor of Beauty. For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well-lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this Day. Such is the salvation of the Dawn.
– The Bhagavad Gita
Arrogance in full bloom bears a crop of ruinous folly
from which it reaps a harvest all of tears.
– Aeschylus
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
– Kurt Vonnegut
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible….
– Thomas Pynchon
Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.
– Joseph Campbell
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
– Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
– Mahatma Gandhi
In the modern working world, we define diversity as a concerted effort to accommodate the full spectrum of human experience.
– Blaise Radley
All religions
All this singing
One song.
– Rumi
Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common… Celebrate it every day.
– Winston Churchill
We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
– Jimmy Carter
I saw before me a huge crowd which no one could count from every nation and tongue. They stood before the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches in their hands…They said, Amen! Praise the glory, wisdom and thanksgiving and honor, power and might to our God forever.
– Revelations 7:9
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
– William Sloane Coffin
On the beach, at dawn;
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the the world,
and how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
– Mary Oliver, On The Beach
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
– Frank Herbert
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
– Vladimir Nabokov
TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don’t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.
– Anne Carson
On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other he is an impersonal creative process.
– Carl Jung
The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him-on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire.
– Carl Jung
Out of a playful movement of elements whose interrelations are not immediately apparent, patterns arise which an observant and critical intellect can only evaluate afterwards.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
– Carl Jung
The unconscious itself is neither tricky nor evil – it is Nature, both beautiful and terrible. . . . The best way of dealing with the unconscious is the creative way. . .
– Carl Jung
It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.
– Carl Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
– Carl Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?
– C. G. Jung
Shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors…If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses etc.
– Carl Jung
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.”
– Carl Jung
The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.
– Alexis Carrel
I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal.
– Lisa Robertson
As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself.
– Lisa Robertson
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.
– Emma Goldman
I was in my early twenties when I discovered what my name was.
– Yelena Furman
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
– E.B. White
…it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life… it was only possible to forget.
– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
So grief isn’t just an emotion, it’s a human capacity to take in the sorrows of the world and metabolize that into medicine for the community. And that’s what we’re missing to a great degree in this culture, is that capacity to see how grief softens the heart, opens the heart.
– Francis Weller, Sounds True Interview
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
– Georges Bataille
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.
– Sylvia Townsend Warner
What is important is not what you believe or do not believe, but to understand the process of your own thinking.
– Krishnamurti
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don’t have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
– Alice McDermott
If you’re afraid to write it,
that’s a good sign.
I suppose you know you’re writing the
truth when you’re terrified.
– Yrsa Daley-Ward
Princes Street Gardens
in among the tourists
a wee dog howls
in sympathy
with the bagpipes
– Alec Finlay
At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.
– Rachel Cusk, Outline
I hate you, I need you, come live with me, let’s make hate together, love,
whatever you want, but together.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
When harm is done to a man, real evil enters into him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. Just as men have the power of transmitting good to one another, so they have the power to transmit evil.
– Simone Weil, Human Personality
Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
– William James
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.
– Jesus
When we fail to appreciate Sophia’s presence at work in nature, we are also more likely to fail to appreciate the sacred.
– Ilia Delio
When they asked me
what my religion was
I said I was
Non-Delusional
– unknown
If you are reading this and are you having a medical ordeal, then this may be of help to you…
Dark cloud is at the door.
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
An offering I make.
Restore my feet for me.
Restore my legs for me.
Restore my body for me.
Restore my mind for me.
Restore my voice for me.
This very day take out your spell for me.
Happily I recover.
Happily my interior becomes cool.
Happily I go forth.
My interior feeling cool, may I walk.
No longer sore, may I walk.
Impervious to pain, may I walk.
With lively feelings may I walk.
As it used to be long ago, may I walk.
– The Night Chant, DINÉ
I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.
– Chet Raymo
Decision takes us into a different experience of time. In Creative Time the end reaches back and pulls the beginning towards it. The decision to engage at any stage in a process puts us in contact with all the other stages in a process. In the world where a decision is taken, the action has already taken place. The decision then moves into ordinary time where an act, a cause, leads to an effect…
– Robert Fripp
Everything I can think of that my parents
thought or did I don’t think and I don’t do.
I opened windows, they shut them. I pulled
open the curtains, they shut them. If you
get my drift. Of course there were some
similarities-they wanted to be happy and
they weren’t. I wanted to be Shelley and I
wasn’t. I don’t mean I didn’t have to avoid
imitation, the gloom was pretty heavy. But
then, for me, there was the forest, where
they didn’t exist. And the fields. Where I
learned about birds and other sweet tidbits
of existence. The song sparrow, for example.
In the song sparrow’s nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
carefully to the father bird as he sings
and make their own song in imitation of his.
I don’t know if any other bird does this (in
nature’s way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn’t have to. Doesn’t have to.
Doesn’t have to. And I didn’t.
– Mary Oliver
In the West, you find the idea that only humans have language. I never believed that. We know bacteria sing to each other, that even subatomic particles are self-aware and communicate and tangle with one another. So, for me, the universe is itself language; everything is speaking to everything else, in particular chemical, sonic, and territorial languages. There are sorts we can’t even imagine, yet together they form part of what we as humans can sense and perceive. We can talk about things as if we know what we are talking about. That’s the most fascinating thing in the world because in truth we don’t know much at all. What we don’t know composes 99.9 percent of the real. That possibility of sensing what we cannot name makes language what it is—a reaching for what cannot be said.
– Cecilia Vicuña
And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time.
The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is.
If you try to correct the sorrows all you do its shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that?
You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with the joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.
– Joseph Campbell
Certainty
by Octavio Paz
If the white light of this lamp
is real, and the hand that writes
is real, then are the eyes that
observe what I write also real?
From one word to another
what I say evaporates.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.
The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o’clock.
– Margaret Halsey
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
– Denise Levertov
Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. . . Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes.
– Walter Wink
responsibility, n. A detachable
burden easily shifted to the
shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune,
Luck or one’s neighbor.
In the days of astrology it was
customary to unload it upon a
star.
– Ambrose Bierce
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
– Stephen Jay Gould
There are moments when things go well and one feels encouraged. There are difficult moments and one feels overwhelmed. But it’s senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism. The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among men, they will grow – that’s reality. The rest is smoke. It’s important to know that words don’t move mountains. Work, exactly work, moves mountains.
– Danilo Dolci
To inquire and to create; these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.
– Robert Bly
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
– Oliver Sacks
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence, but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world. The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counselor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave; a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s.
– David Whyte
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
– Marcel Prous
Instead of seeing karma as a debt incurred in the past, perhaps we can learn to see it as a motive for positive action towards creating a new future? The past is beyond anyone’s grasp to fix.
– Pico Iyer
I am so busy. I am practicing
my new hobby of watching me
become someone else. There is
so much violence in reconstruction.
Every minute is grisly, but I have
to participate. I am building
what I cannot break.
– Jennifer Willoughby
Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.
– Goethe
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with
anger.
– Simone de Beauvoir
In the last corner of the labyrinth of the soul grunts a frightened ape.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
If I see one dilemma with man, it’s that he can’t accept how beautiful he is. He can’t accept that he is pure light, that he’s pure love, that he’s pure consciousness, that he’s divine.
– Ram Dass
How strange it is to think that love, so vital and all- consuming, can slip away like
water through your fingers.
– Haruki Murakami
We are synthetic men, uprooted.
The strength of the hills is not ours.
– C.S. Lewis
She is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair …
– Oscar Wilde
How strange is man. He destroys his present while worrying about his future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past.
– Imam Ali
Perception, imagination, expectation, anticipation, illusion-all are based on memory. There are hardly any border lines between them. They just merge into each other. All are responses of memory.
– Nisargadatta
. . . ah, thought kills me, that I am not thought
– William Shakespeare
dawnlit sky
a canvas
of birdsongs
– Chen-ou Liu
A University degree, four books and hundreds of articles and | still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me ‘good morning’ and I read it as ‘I love you’
– Mahmoud Darwish
As your mind becomes more quiet and less reactive, it is natural to have less to say. Just allow yourself to become more okay and more comfortable with your silence. Let everything take its natural course. Nothing stays the same forever, or even for very long.
– Adyashanti
What you need will come to you if you do not ask for what you do not need. Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
– Ellen Willis
Most people don’t have a life problem.
They have a thinking problem.
The same thoughts, repeated every day, create the same experiences.
– Remez Sasson
She naturally loved solitary
places, vast views, and to feel
herself for ever and ever and ever
alone.
– Virginia Woolf
With you, intimacy colours my voice. Even ‘hello’
sounds like ‘come here.’
– Warsan Shire
I am not all hostile with regard to magic. I even think that, in many cases, it constitutes a mode of mapping of psychic Assemblages of great interest.
– Guattari
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing dipped in oblivion? If not, you will never really change.
– D.H. Lawrence
You will be given back the years that the locusts have taken.
– Buddy Wakefield
By degrees, as the night came on, this second crowd changed its character, and when the gas-lamps were lighted, two descriptions of besetting people faded away, and gave place to others.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Why did you vanish…
by Izumi Shikibu
Translated by Jane Hirshfield
Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.
The truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins.
– Ada Limón, A New National Anthem
Learning to write … is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.
– Bret Lott
How Many?
by Najwan Darwish
How many bedrooms do I need
to get a bit of sleep?
How many chairs
to sit myself down?
How many roads
to walk back to you,
my distant country?
This time I’ve gone
and I’m not coming back
Your job, now, is to slip out,
lovesick and afraid,
and come in search of me.
The most exquisite pleasure in the
practice of medicine comes from
nudging a layman in the direction
of terror, then bringing him back
to safety again.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Vertigo
by Anne Stevenson
Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.
I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that that is life. I will find peace only in eternal rest. I thus cannot really say that I assume this contradiction, but I know that it is what keeps me alive, and makes me ask precisely the question you recalled earlier, ‘how does one learn to live?’
– Jacques Derrida
We are attached to another because in ourselves we are insufficient, psychologically dependent, and therein lies our misery.
– Krishnamurti
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
– John Stuart Mill
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
– William S. Burroughs
If you’ve never been here, never been present, I’m sure you’ll be terrified of death because your whole life has been an absence.
– Marion Woodman
Don’t take security in the false refuge of consensus.
– Christopher Hitchens
Sorrow is real love in the future.
Generous people are the only ones who love in excess.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by what we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us.
– D. Stephenson Bond
Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing.
– Dolly Parton
When you got up the courage to read me I was already in another book.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The main affliction of civilization is that we don’t know how to handle suffering inside and so we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
Love is like death, it must come to us all, but to each his own unique way and time, sometimes it will be avoided, but never can it be cheated, and never will it be forgotten.
– Jacob Grimm
Fools, the solution for everything is on our lips.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.
– Rumi
I believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.
– JFK
To talk like that, like there’s no hope, I don’t know, that just seems wrong to me. I don’t think anyone has the right to tell people there’s no hope.
– Sigrid Nunez
my heart is crushed, and soon you won’t fit inside —and these hands aren’t cowardly enough to reject you—.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
If capitalism worked corporations would not need tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, ballouts, legal protections, and trade barriers in order to survive.
– Edward Shuttleworth
I have forgotten you,
broken love.
But don’t be afraid
that no one will remember you:
poetry won’t ever forget you.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
But be free,
blessed sadness,
be free,
– Elvira Sastre
Wake up from the dream of the ego. The waking state is just as much a dream as the nightly one.
– Lalla Ded
Your life is a journey from the illusion of “two” to the reality of “one.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
– J. G. Ballard
Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
– Thomas Sowell
You have two hands: One to help yourself, the second to help others.
– Audrey Hepburn
The more we see the injustice of the world, the more we are tempted to use our own power to bring about justice, but in so doing we often create new forms of injustice.
– Henri Nouwen, With Burning Hearts
Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’
– Dave Eggers
The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.
– CG Jung
Whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.
– Elif Batuman
I tend to make peace with my world
when I see someone talking alone
out loud: one less case of solitude.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The mind is a wound that never heals, only learns to hide the bleeding.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
– Babe Ruth
It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task.
– CG Jung
Writers aren’t people exactly. They’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
In effect, conflicts are ‘fed’ more readily than people are nourished. This reality reflects not only operational shortcomings but also a fundamental imbalance in political and moral priorities.
– Pope Leo XIV
The archetype is a force with autonomy and it can suddenly seize you like a seizure. Falling in love at first sight, is such a case.
– CG Jung
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.
– Georges Bataille
Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo.
– Milan Kundera
One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves.
– Eric Fromm
The truth is that the city,
my lungs
and climate change
have been thankful for this springtime communion.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
– Yukio Mishima
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
– George Washington Carver
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.
– Emil-August Chartier
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
– John Archibald Wheeler
The love you gave was never lost. It became part of the subtle architecture of the universe.
– Nataraj Chaitanya
He smiled at her as a man might smile at a memory.
– John Steinbeck
Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
– Maggie Nelson
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Do not speak lightly; words are not to be cast away. Every word finds an answer; every good deed it’s recompense.
– Confucius
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
– Lucy Larcom
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.
– Anne Spollen
God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God does require of us is that we not stop trying.
– Bayard Rustin
You are not big enough to accuse the whole age effectively, but let us say you are in dissent. You are in no position to issue commands, but you can speak words of hope. Shall this be the substance of your message? Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing. But I warn you, do not expect to make many friends.
– Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
If you’ve decided to become a gymnast, you have to go through training that involves a lot of repetition . . . To become a doctor, you need to be strong academically. To become a lawyer, you need a certain level of wits. But to become a proficient lojong practitioner, all you need is determination. Recognizing the cause of your suffering, you are determined to reduce your self-centeredness; and recognizing the cause of joy, you are determined to cultivate an altruistic state of mind. The wisdom and skillful means of these practices are universally applicable, no matter who you are. They are right there to help you fulfill your motivation. All you need to do is practice over and over, gradually acquiring familiarity.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
Immersed
Having no hope for outcome
or reward is how we stay immersed
in the exchange. We shape clay,
brush paint across a canvas, press
words that arrive on the wind
of each new breath onto a blank page,
expecting nothing in return but joy
in the act of creation. It’s the same
for the mulberry tree, which does not
worry each summer which birds
it will attract, or how many, before
agreeing to bloom and fruit—it simply
sends out the berries it has to give
without wavering, because the body
says to, because like us, the tree
can’t help itself.
– James Crews
I regard Consciousness as fundamental.
I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness.
We cannot get behind Consciousness.
Everything that we talk about,
everything that we regard as existing,
postulates Consciousness.
– Max Planck
I want to live in a world where harm is not systemic, where love organizes society, where the earth is respected, and where life is valued above all else.
– Yung Pueblo
It is not the gentle loving mother
we need, but the destroyer.
It is the only way we will ever
have a chance to save our planet
from the killing machines and the
men who operate them.
– Tamara Albanna
The good news
they do not print.
The good news
we do print.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
that the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen. You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow,
of preoccupation,
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is a māyā, an illusion, that we all imagine ourselves to be living inside our skins separated from the rest of the cosmos. We’ve been taught to ignore this enormously significant relationship.
– Alan Watts
What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions towards others.
– CG Jung
The mind is a beautiful tool. But if we’re used by it, we’ll quickly find ourselves back in the spinning web of egoic consciousness.
– Adyashanti
A word, so long as it’s not absorbed without remainder into a sense, remains essentially extended between other words, stretching to touch them, though not merging with them: and that’s language as body.
– Jean-Luc Nancy, (tr. Richard A. Rand)
We believe in so many things on hearsay. We believe in distant lands and people, in heavens and hells, in gods and goddesses, because we were told. Similarly, we were told about ourselves, our parents, name, position, duties and so on. We never cared to verify.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
If one keeps one’s cool one is always alright.
– G.B. Smith
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
– Irvin D. Yalom
You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. Abandon all conceptualization and stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it and all will be well with you.
– Nisargadatta
You are powerful enough to raise your spirit in any situation that may seem to bring it down.
– Michael Logue
Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself; and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart …
It is not enough to get remote from the public; ’tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must sequester and come again to himself …
– Montaigne
bees on clover
obsessed and
unashamed
– Ogawa
As long as the mind is there, your body and your world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory.
– Nisargadatta
I think there are multiple stories within any “true” story. If I choose to write something that involves another person, I’d better have done the work to become aware, to have asked the questions, to have considered the consequences.
– Lynette D’Amico, Whose Story Is It Anyway?
How could everybody hate you / If there was no everybody? Or even anybody.
– Arthur Vogelsang
What is empty
can’t be emptied.
We have reached the end of
ending.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.
– John Clare
You can insult a man pretty badly by using a word he doesn’t understand.
Blizzard in the suburbs
-the mailman
And the poet walking
– Jack Kerouac
Book of Haikus
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
– Carl Sagan
Writers working in fragments or building a collection already know: it’s hard to string all the writing together in a way that feels naturally connected and makes deeper meaning.
– Allison K Williams
Perhaps we’re all fellow sufferers unable to see each other’s truth.
– Irvin D. Yalom
It is vital to remember that information—in the sense of raw data—is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
– Arthur C. Clarke
after summer rain
the cedar bark
breathes again
– Basho
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
– Leo Tolstoy
Being in harmony means you’re experiencing your self as an integral part of life instead of as someone who is opposing a piece of life. When you experience harmony, you know it.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
We are here to help each other get
through this thing, whatever it is.
– Dr. Mark Vonnegut
In this universe, which was created by a Divine, organizing intelligence, there are simply no accidents.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Living safely is dangerous.
– Yalom
cicada heat
even silence
starts humming
– Ogawa
Your burden is of false self-identifications – abandon them all. You are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. Focus the mind on the pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
– Franz Kafka
“Very well,” he thought, “there are truths that have no words.”
– John Gardner
Your circumstances do not determine what your life will be; they reveal what kinds of images you have chosen up until now. … Once your thoughts reflect what you genuinely want to be, the appropriate emotions and the consequent behavior will flow automatically.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
How do I look away now
that I have seen you?
– Rachel Mennies
To attain self-realization, there’s really nothing you have to do. It does not require puja, it does not require meditation, it does not require prayer, it does not require yoga. It does not require anything, for self-realization is your natural state to begin with.
– Robert Adams
summer moon
the body remembers
its wild grammar
– Akari
We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture. One that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection, but actively fears them. We are all victimized by the violence of disassociation and disconnection.
– bell hooks
And even if we never talk again, please remember that I’m forever changed by who you are and what you meant to me.
– Chasing Amy
The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.
– Mikko Harvey
The only place you will ever find me, is on my growth edge.
– Nika Solé
When you adhere to one philosophical system (siddhanta) you are obliged to condemn the others. That is the case with the heads of monasteries (matadhipatis).
– Ramana Maharshi
summer noon
time itself
slows
– Ogawa
If I am anything, which I highly doubt, I have made myself so by hard work.
– Isaac Newton
My journal has become the journal of
you. It is full of you – brimming full.
– Anais Nin
Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in the bankruptcy.
– Ryan Holiday
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
– Aldous Huxley
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundance of the poor.
– Voltaire
Allow me to give you some advice from the heart: don’t give up art, and even give yourself over to it even more than so far… Living in solitude and embittering your soul with recollections, you can make your life very gloomy. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is not that the time we have is meagre, but that we lose much of it.
– Seneca
No one can get out of their individuality.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
My memory of men
is never lit up and
illuminated like my
memory of women.
– Marguerite Duras
Wearing her heart on her sleeve would be too conventional for [Emily Dickinson], who slaps it on a fruit dish and sends it down the street like a phone-order pizza.
– Camille Paglia
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, and unnecessary suffering.
– Terry Eagleton
Poetry is an art of beginnings and
ends. You want middles, read
novels.
– Dean Young
Every time I sit down to write, I think, Will I find someone at the crossroads? And sometimes I do, and I feel my soul. When I don’t, I’m disappointed.
– Jamaica Kincaid
The distance from this sentence to your eyes is my sculpture.
– Ken Friedman
what I love about the world is its shape
– Edwin Morgan
humid dawn
my shirt already
defeated
– Aoki
It is the untold stories that are most moving.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Evidence
A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond
positively to birdsong
– scientific researcher, Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2012
Centuries of English verse
Suggest the selfsame thing:
A negative response is rare
When birds are heard to sing.
What’s the use of poetry?
You ask. Well, here’s a start:
It’s anecdotal evidence
About the human heart.
At first love seemed easy,
But then difficulties arose.
– Hafiz
You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.
– Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
– Jamie Tworkowksi
Even disasters have design. I told her I distrust history now more than ever, because how much of it has always been gaslighting and ruthless curating? How much of what we believe was decided for us? I explained to her that we are always living in each other’s collective imagination. We can only be free to the extent to which we, or people who love us, can see.
– Eloghosa Osunde
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own. Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own selves and lives. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children’s stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.
– Rebecca Solnit
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist
Empire is militant denial. It is also a form of faith. The bad faith of an abusive husband can be addressed in court. The bad faith of a trillionaire who denies the incoming data of his own lifestyle choices is less easy to manage, but it can be addressed by people who insistently tell the truth and invite that trillionaire to step outside of his armored vehicles, touch grass, and behave like a human being among human beings, considering the data of his doings. When he declines, that’s more data on what we’re contending with when it comes to him & his enablers. They are outnumbered. Empire is doomed.
– David Dark
one of life’s bitter truths is that grief can only be processed alone, while joy – its truest form – can only be felt when shared.
– unknown
You are the alchemist
of your loneliness.
You can create anything
in its place.
– Warsan Shire
If we are going to regard the universe as a result of evolution at all, we must think that not merely the existing universe…but the whole Platonic world, which in itself is equally real, is evolutionary in its origin, too.
– Peirce
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants, if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.
– Charles Caleb Colton
All things in heaven and on earth are wonderful! But the greatest wonder is man’s freedom to choose between good and evil!
– Faust
Buddhahood – the discovery of dharmakaya – is nothing other than the uncontrived and unadulterated essence of awareness becoming evident.
– Longchenpa
With both hands I’ve forgotten, I keep
Having forgotten, I keep
Having forgotten. I’ll have no such shrines here.
I will not bow in the middle of the room
To the statue of nothing
With the flies turning around it.
On these four walls I am the writing.
– WS Merwin
They swallow God without thinking,
they swallow country without thinking.
Soon they forget how to think,
they let others think for them.
– Charles Bukowski
I think we are seeing a hunger that is not just felt by New Yorkers, but frankly by Americans from coast to coast, for a new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it.
– Mayor Zohran Mamdani
My love
Is like the grasses
Hidden in the deep mountain;
Though its abundance increases,
There is none that knows.
– Ono no Yoshiki
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
The future of psychiatry will be in de-prescribing.
Trust me
We are moving in that direction
– Dr. Roger McFillin
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
– David Foster Wallace
I don’t know, but dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don’t know how, just like I don’t know how to write it but it came.
– Flannery O’Connor
Language ceases to be merely a vehicle of meaning and appears as sonic material that affects the body.
– Lacan
mountain path …
I slip a little
into the past
– Dave Read
If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
– Roland Barthes
Are you healed or are you isolated with no
one around to trigger you?
– Carl Jung
There is nothing we can be more proud of than the independence of our heart.
– Gabriela Mistral
Spare your heart some space for forgiveness. Not for them but for yourself.
– Verliza Gajeles
You have tried changing things the way you want. Now try accepting them the way they are. Acceptance brings things closer to you. And closer they are, more influence you have over them.
– Shunya
The spirit is the wing of the Soul.
– Kabir
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
– Frantz Fanon
Those who have understanding do not please the majority, nor does the majority please them. Consequently, they are considered mad and are mocked; they are hated and despised, and sometimes they are even murdered.
– Hermes, Corpus Hermeticum IX, (On Thought and Sense)
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.
– Peter Kropotkin
The future rewards those who press on. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.
– Barack Obama
Without a noise, without my pride, I reach out from the inside.
– Peter Gabriel
What use is a writer if not to destroy literature?
– Julio Cortázar
are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?
a lot of weight when you’re well.
– Toni Cade Bambara
Real intelligence in politics, as in science, is the ability to recognize connections that are not necessarily obvious, to see relationships—seeing the interconnectedness of all life, all peoples, and all wars. Real intelligence is the ability to understand that when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects all mankind destructively, including those who unleash it.
– F. William Engdahl
If you don’t think every day is a good day, try missing a few. You’ll see.
– Bob Ross
the sun is up
in its place
the clouds are
down in theirs
– Alec Finlay
Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.
– Ernest Hemingway
I really cannot stress enough how infinitely serious climate collapse is. every issue we’ve ever faced will dwarf in comparison. if we continue to allow big oil and corporations to lord over us through our so called governments, society will fall.
– @earthlyeducation
A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise.
– Confucius
And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.
– Stephen King
Half of life is lost in charming others.
The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.
Leave this play. You have played enough.
– Rumi
Friends or not, the competition between them is always lurking just below the surface. Rivalry isn’t in the water—it is the water. It’s what can buoy or drown them.
– Dorey Beck Stein
The mystery of one human being is too immense and too profound to be explained by another.
– Henri Nouwen
Yes, I love you, and if you knew to what extent, nothing could sadden you—not even for a second—in your entire life.
– Albert Camus to María Casares
Every time I wrote a book, I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship, while the same time giving courage to people.
– Ismail Kadaré
The practice of slowing down to notice the living world around us, and the practice of tending to our inner lives, are not separate practices. They nourish each other.
– Kritee Kanko, PhD
There’s so few people in Congress who are willing to just be like, the government doesn’t pick ideological winners and losers in choosing what to fund, and that includes the arts. And so sometimes the government is going to fund art that makes people angry, and that is OK, because making people angry is actually a legitimate function of the arts.
– Isaac Butler
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;
And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.
– Jeffrey Harrison
In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him
– Bhagavad Gita
For it is in lingering that we receive insight,
that consecrates.
– Rilke
Inside the heart, a murmur of poems.
– Sam Roxas-Chua
The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry
It is your integrity and your kindness that makes the world beautiful. May all beings be happy.
– Michael Kewley
Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room. Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time.
– Martha Beck
I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope– an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford’s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one’s past.
One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.
– John Fowles
Let’s hope we are learning more about the ‘arts of noticing.’ This kind of attention is not about relationships between the human brain and ‘the world out there’ but is all about immersion in living ecologies. Aboriginal people I have worked with learn about it from their elders. As children they are not encouraged to ask questions, just to be attentive. After a while they know. It is know-how more than knowledge. When an Aboriginal tracker sees things in the environment that the rest of us fail to notice, this is not a matter of a specialised psychology, but a matter of intergenerational attunement in a particular world. Noticing one thing may also depend on being attuned to many others: the sun, the wind and the way finches flock in that part of the country. It’s an art, but not necessarily an individual one. It comes in bursts, or in waves.
– Stephen Muecke
If you eliminate even one group, you
eliminate the entire
circle.
– Bernie Glassman
If systems help create homelessness,
systems can help prevent it.
– Prince William
First of all nothing will happen, and a little later nothing will happen again.
– Leonard Cohen
I like that the language in a poem doesn’t
have to be euphonious. It can be discordant.
It can be gnarly, crunchy. It’s something
you can feel in your mouth, the mouthfeel
of the poem.
– Harryette Mullen
What method should the truth now adopt so it can compete with the lie and also be believed?
– Günther Anders
We are not taught to be thinkers, but
reflectors of our culture. Let’s teach
our children to be thinkers.
– Jacque Fresco
This shit doesn’t happen in France, and I’ll tell you why: the rich went too far and they cut all their heads off and now, when those in charge get above themselves, the French just stop working and everyone remembers who actually holds the real power. Don’t forget your real power.
– unknown
Taking it easy feels empty unless you’ve done something hard, the vitality of life is found in the contrasts, and by heightening the contrasts you deepen life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
– Lauren Groff
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
– Octavia Butler
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
I feel like that now: tired of the Me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me…
– George Saunders
The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause.
– Leo Tolstoy
Nothing hinders people’s improvements more than their desire to improve their own lives through violence. Violence against others distracts people more than anything else from the one thing that can improve their lives: striving to become better themselves.
– Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
– Anne Carson
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
– Anne Carson
A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden.
– Fanny Howe
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
– Gustave Flaubert
Strive to become the true human being:
one who knows love, one who knows pain.
Be full, be humble, be utterly silent,
be the bowl of wine passed from hand to hand.
– Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
– Tom Stoppard
Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.
– Gaston Bachelard
Wrote a thing for that 250th birthday trying, first of all, to refuse to define the USA as one thing rather than many. E pluribus unum all the way home. Here it is:
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet the jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one-third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a half-time show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingual one, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February.
She had dropped out of the sport, refusing to be another one of those young women who are managed and controlled, and then returned on her own terms. As she skated out of the arena after a stunning performance, she shouted: “That’s what I’m fucking talking about,” as she laughed joyously.
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive cleanup operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
In the end, I come back to Abraham Lincoln at the battlefield and burial grounds of Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is in one sense an ideal never yet realized, in the other a moral north toward which this country at its best has been pointing for those 250 years.
– Rebecca Solnit
The only way out for America now as far as I can see is socialism…. It simply is a shame that there is no real progressive party because now there is a progressive scene possible.
– Allen Ginsberg
like the god
who knows every hair on your head,
this bird has memorized each flower
in your yard
– Ann Tweedy
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or forty-seven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it’s going to be in words.
– William Faulkner, Light in August
The spirit of childhood knows no hatred, frustration or resentment. It stands naked and immense before the universe. It demands a response that matches its dreams. It asks for a renewed miracle every day.
The children sway like the fountains, the sun’s reflections, the movement of the clouds. You are missing this high light that frees the soul and makes the body light. Rediscover this feeling of plenitude in all your actions and your life will change.
In difficult trials, in the face of daily aggression, use the spirit of childhood as a crystal shield. It is one of the weapons of the spiritual warrior. It does not respond to violence with aggression. Its nature is more subtle. It reflects and returns light.
– Dugpa Rimpoche
Be ever mindful of the shortcomings of desire’s rewards, and know that all the phenomena of the cycle of existence are never still, like the ripples on a pond, and that these manifestations of delusion, which are no things in themselves, are like magic and dreams.
When you have the determination to be free of samsara and are content with your material situation, you will be able to sit quietly with your mind happy and at ease.
– Kalu Rinpoche
Try to spend much time by yourself. Do not read too much. Do not watch TV too much. Do not get involved with the world too much. Go deep, dive deep within yourself and find all the answers you’re looking for. They are all within you, they’ve always been there.
– Robert Adams
In dreams begins responsibility, said a poet. In dreams, in imagination, we begin to be one another. I am thou. The barriers go down.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
– Bob Dylan
You do not want to give up either worldly knowledge or so-called spiritual knowledge, and yet, through these worldly concepts, you want to understand the riddle of your existence, and that is precisely why you are not able to understand.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I prefer a theology of silence, the eschatology
of the shrug, a religion of holding my wife’s hand
for now.
– Bob Hicok
Before you act, you have freedom, but after you act, the effect of that action will follow you whether you want it to or not. That is the law of karma. You are a free agent, but when you perform a certain act, you will reap the results of that act.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
God // is a dress we slip over solitude.
– Bob Hicok
The most highly credentialed people I know aren’t wealthy.
They’re broke.
– Tim Denning
There is no need to turn round and round in endless questioning; find your Self and everything will fall into its proper place.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Expect and…endure with patience both faces of fortune. For all things follow from God’s eternal decree….hate no one, despise no one, ridicule no one, be angry with no one, envy no one….each should be content with what he has and should help his neighbor.
– Spinoza
Do not cling to what is inferior, either in yourself or others. If a person or thought or practice is not in harmony with the principles of the Sage, quietly let go.
– I Ching [17.2], Brian Browne Walker
I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes I am
empty for a very
long time.
I have no identity.
– Marguerite Duras
after work
the soul unbuttons
slowly
– Akari
it’s so easy to be a poet
and so hard to be
a man.
– Charles Bukowski
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
– Immanuel Kant
True spirituality is not easy. It means changing your entire viewpoint, looking at life completely differently. Trying to keep quiet most of the time. Keeping your mind quiet, never allowing it to judge, never allowing your mind to think too much on any one subject.
– Robert Adams
Birches
by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Realization is for everyone; Realization makes no difference between the aspirants. This very doubt, whether you can realize, and the notion ‘I- have-not-realized’ are themselves the obstacles. Be free from these obstacles also.
– Ramana Maharshi
I think in order to survive one must be reborn, one must overcome one’s childhood, the injustices, and recognize the privileges. You can’t use your past as an alibi.
– Leonard Cohen
You are part of a system, a universe, that has perfectly well been able to take care of itself for at least 10,000 million years.
– Alan Watts
First, space, which has been an open dimension
since the beginningless beginning,
and pristine awareness, are indivisible.
Pristine awareness denotes that aspect
within the discerning capacity of the mind
that has been there since the very beginning.
– Guru Padmasambhava
Alphard My favorite star is Alphard,
very heart of the Hydra,
(I think it means the solitary one)
earth’s atmospheric scintillations
making it erratically
and often rather eerily,
continue still
to beat.
– Julian Cason
We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?
– J.G. Keely
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
– Julio Cortazar
You project your chemistry on other people and your relations with them are a result.
Your unconscious manifestations are more powerful and get more results than your so called ‘conscious.’
You receive what you evoke.
– Kathryn Hulme
I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Ten thousand / Atoms of sorrow whirl away / In the wind.
– Tu Fu (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
Critical thinking builds corporate cultures of accountability in which critical voices are not silenced. And a trained imagination is essential for innovation, a key to any healthy economy: no nation can thrive on the basis of yesterday’s skills learned by rote.
– Martha C. Nussbaum
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.
– Ingrid Bergman
i turn off the lamp
the moths escape from the cult
they’d stumbled into
– clark strand
I think advice is best kept til asked for…. One must beware of meddling.
– C.S. Lewis
Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
– R.E.M.
Im full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.
– Ernest Hemingway
Empathy requires a secure enough self to tolerate someone else’s reality without it being a referendum on your own work.
– Brad Reedy
The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
– Adyashanti
The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen.
– Epictetus
The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the further left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the further to the right he or she will be.
– Roderick Stackelberg
The thing about your words is they reveal what’s inside of you, and you will never rise above your words.
– Zig Ziglar
Ethics alone is not enough to make a change in the world. For instance, take the environment: We’re not motivated to fight for it simply because we ought to. Of course we are ethically responsible…. We must first be moved by beauty. For then, love is aroused. When you love something, then you want it near, not to be harmed
– James Hillman, What Kind of Society Nurtures the Soul?
There will come a time when your only source of peace and happiness will be found in withdrawing from the noise of the crowd.
– Ali Ibni Thalib
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud
My creative spasm comes only in the early hours of the morning when the enemy in my body is too sleepy to throw up walls against the foray of my brain.
– J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands
Pain leaves a mark too deep to be seen, a mark beyond the reach of sight and mind.
– Margaret Atwood
A certain kind of micrology and belief in authority are characteristics of greatness — namely, the perfecting micrology of the artist, and the historical belief in the authority of nature.
– Friedrich Schlegel
Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
– Rumi
I don’t believe in state control of industry or collectivizing farms, but I do see value in policies derived from a socialist ethos, like Social Security and Medicare.
– Jon Stewart
Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education
No one can see you exactly as you are; everyone understands you only as much as their own knowledge allows.
– Saadi Shirazi
If the individual is nothing, society cannot be something. Take his substance away from him, and the State has no more substance; if he has nothing to sacrifice, there is nothing before him to sacrifice to.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Hebrideean scene
the lux-
uriance of
an orchid
in the rags
of a sun-
breeze
– Alec Finlay
On this 250th birthday/anniversary, I can’t help but think of Buddy the Elf and what he says in the mailroom:
“You’re young, you’re so young.”
“My Papa, he didn’t make Master Tinker until he was 490.”
– Anne Heaton
The male God is an ontological lie,
intellectual regression, and theological disaster.
– Helen Hye-Sook Hwang
It is not the gentle loving mother we need, but the destroyer.
It is the only way we will ever have a chance to save our planet from the killing machines and the men who operate them.
– Tamara Albanna
White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society – and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.
– Erna Kim Hackett
A person can spend thirty years acquiring the complete literature of their own liberation and never act on a single sentence of it. The collecting feels like progress because it carries the texture of effort without the risk of exposure.
This is the most sophisticated trap on the entire road to sovereignty, because the internal saboteur has learned to perform growth and quote the philosophers while avoiding the one irreversible move that would change everything.
You break this by taking an action you cannot retract and discovering that the world declines to end. What follows is the humiliation of realizing how long you stood at a door that was never locked, and then the clean air of having finally walked through it.
– Stan Taylor
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
– Jane Austen
Looking for
consciousness
in the brain
is like looking
inside a radio
for the
announcer.
– Nassim Haramein
Lochan
(For Jean Johnstone)
When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high
drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June,
with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me. I mean
to find among the thousands
scattered in that land
a certain quiet lochan,
where water lilies rise
like small fat moons,
and tied among the reeds,
underneath a rowan,
a white boat waits.
– Kathleen Jamie
Therapy helps but let’s be clear. You can’t CBT your way out of capitalism. You can’t mindfulness your way out of racism. You can’t self care your way out of oppression.
You can’t journal your way out of ableism. This isn’t about coping, it’s about deconstructing the systems.
– Briana Mills
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.
– Franz Kafka
I still believe in my country, not because I am immune to / disappointment nor because I’ve stopped counting the ways we fail / each other, but because here, people keep doing small impossible / things.
– Oladosu Michael Emerald
Hold to the now, the
here, through which all
future plunges to the past.
– James Joyce
And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.
– Vincent van Gogh
We are the expression and extension of a long line of survivors. Our lives are but a continuation of all those who came before. And though many perished, your people didn’t. They saw and lived and endured and their resilience is your true inheritance. In this way, their wounds are our own, in that it is always up to us to turn the salt of bitterness into the salt of wisdom. It is liberating to consider that when we heal an ancestral pattern, we are healing backwards through time, liberating all those souls who were left unresolved, unforgiven and misunderstood.
– Toko-pa Turner
A poet is the first citizen of his country and for this very reason it is the duty of the poet to be concerned about the politics of his country.
– Yiannis Ritsos
Recently, I was asked, “In what ways are your poems political?”
Is the practice of seeing political? Is the practice of meditating political? People have made it their duty to hurt other people. There have been successful and unsuccessful attempts to eradicate people on this earth. The dismemberment has been active. As long as we are living in a society or culture that says that it’s okay for some people to have voices and others to not have voices, then speaking is a political act. As long as we are living in a society that promotes war, hate, fear—then, sadly, even love is made political. But I believe love is larger than politics much larger, but as long as systems are trying to dismantle love-then, in this context, the poem for love, for liberation, for humanity becomes political—because political systems are institutionalizing or reiterating hatred.
So, then, the poem protesting the killing of people in Iraq, the poem protesting the brutal displacement of Palestinians, the poem envisioning better schools in our neighborhoods-these should be called common sense poems, I think. But these poems are made political because they are in direct response to political violations and systems that are against people.
– Aracelis Girmay
MEDITATION: Because some answers can only be found on the Inner net.
– Shira Tamir
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
– Octavia E. Butler
Do not be distracted from this state beyond all thought.
And although there is no particular deity to meditate upon,
no visualization details or attributes that you have to remember,
no object for the mind to concentrate on,
at the same time there must be no wandering,
no lack of mindfulness.
The close mindfulness and vigilance needed here
are the same as those of someone
trying to pull a thorn out of his skin
– very carefully, without hurting himself.
The real meditation is to simply remain in the absolute nature
without obscuring the mind with all sort of intellectual constructs.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
The human heart wants to give, and when we let it, it opens up and heals us, body, mind, and spirit.
– Cara Lai
In(ter)dependence Day
It is summer and I want to celebrate
that my neighbor speaks English and Spanish
in the same sentence,
that I can read any book I want,
that my body is mine
to fling into the lake or walk freely
down the street without fear.
I want to celebrate with potlucks,
block parties, fusion dancing,
and poetry. With laughter
and community, cookouts
and accountability.
While we celebrate the hard-won
freedom we gained,
please also remember
that it is our interdependence
not just our independence
that makes this life worth
fighting for.
– Alix Klingenberg
Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.
– H.D. Thoreau
when they all turned blue
ranchers piled on tires and petrol : lit
them: and so the blue sheep rose
in plumes over the prairie : am I counting
them now?: in the warhead factory
down the road lead-gloved hands shaped
sleepless isotopes into triggers:
– Radha Marcum, 3 a.m.
Listen to me. This may save your life.
There is a spirituality that seems “untouchable” – always calm, always wise, always unemotional. Never angry.
Never sad.
Never suffering.
Like pristine pottery – smooth, symmetrical, untouched by chaos. Beautiful to look at. But lifeless in the hands. No cracks, no fingerprints, no blood.
Just repressive silence posing as peace.
And beneath it, a terrible fear:
Fear of mess. Fear of grief. Fear of being fully human. Fear of intimacy.
I know. I hid there once, too. I thought peace meant rising above heartbreak, longing, trauma.
Hiding out in “Pure Awareness” … like a zombie.
But life did not let me escape. Grief came anyway. Shame. Rage. Doubt. Not to punish me, but to finally liberate me.
True peace did not come from avoiding my humanity. It came only when I turned toward it. When I let myself be cracked open.
When I surrendered, and found God in the wreckage.
I do not seek a polished spirituality anymore. Not the kind that bypasses trauma. Not the kind that mistakes emotional numbness for wisdom.
I seek trembling. I seek the body, the nervous system, the sensuality and raw truth of each sacred moment.
In the end, life shatters every dogma, even the dogma called “Pure Awareness.”
What remains is the holy mess. Grief. Longing. Rage. Connection. The utter, utter beauty of the unresolved.
You are not here to be perfect. You are here to be utterly fucking real.
You are here to lose the answers and feel your way through. You are here to weep your way toward the Beloved, in mad devotion to life.
Even your deepest human wound is not a mistake. Don’t bypass it.
Flood it with the elixir of warm merciful attention and breath.
Then it is nothing less
than a doorway home.
– Jeff Foster
Surrender is what
finally begins to
disentangle us from
life’s difficulties.
– Jack Kornfield
Jesus was not a Christian.
He never used the word. He never asked anyone to become one. He never instructed people to build a religion around his life, defend doctrines about his identity, or worship his person. He invited people into a radically different way of being human.
Christianity came later.
It was constructed over centuries through the interpretations of Paul, the theological battles of bishops, the decisions of church councils, and eventually the interests of empires. Whatever Christianity became, it was no longer simply the life Jesus lived. It had become a religion about Jesus more than the way of Jesus.
History’s greatest irony may be that Jesus spent much of his life confronting religious authority, only to become the central figure of one of history’s largest religions.
If Jesus walked into most churches today, I suspect he would be less interested in joining them than in asking the same uncomfortable questions he asked two thousand years ago. Who benefits from this system? Why are people carrying burdens they were never meant to carry? Why has love become secondary to belief? Why is certainty valued more highly than compassion?
Jesus remains one of history’s best-kept secrets because millions have been introduced to Christianity without ever being introduced to him.
There is a religion-free Jesus waiting beneath centuries of doctrine, dogma, institutional control, and theological argument. He belongs no more to Christianity than the Buddha belongs to Buddhism or Socrates belongs to the academy. Great human beings inevitably become larger than the institutions built in their names.
Christianity does not own Jesus. It never did.
To encounter him may require leaving behind much of what has been said about him in order to hear him again with unborrowed ears. The truth that sets us free may begin by freeing Jesus from the religion created in his name.
– Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
We are hurt; we are lonely:
and we turn to music or words,
and as compensation beyond all
price we are given glimpses of
the world on the other side of
time and space.
– Madeleine LEngle
The most real never dies. The unreal never lived.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
– John Steinbeck
Good tea is eloquent enough, it turns out, to change a person’s mind.
– Banana Yoshimoto
The one who knows what is good, and not the man who knows many things, is wise.
– Aeschylus
The motivation of evil, blind absorption by contingent self-interest, tends to dissolve in the medium of thought.
– Theodor W. Adorno
I want to learn from those who have slowly discovered the long way to what lasts.
– Tish Harrison Warren
I think the poets and novelists are often further along than the scientists, as they often are.
– Michael Pollan
If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
– Federico Fellini
I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.
– Boze Herrington
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
– Elbert Hubbard
Resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civilian institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission, and … it is not the military’s job to save the republic from political impasses. Indeed, if you ask too much of the military, you risk the entire enterprise.
– General Charles Q Brown
“Are you a communist?”
“No I am an anti-fascist”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
– Ernest Hemingway
I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it can take.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
– Iris Murdoch
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.
– George Eliot, Adam Bede
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
– Franz Kafka
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
– Thomas Jefferson
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
– John Adams
They have all kinds of laws. Laws that can help you, too!
– Mary Astor
Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.
– Edith Wharton
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
– Thomas Jefferson
I am still the captain of my soul.
– J. M. Coetzee
Failure need not be permanent In a world in which in all evils are due to lack of knowledge.
– David Deutsch, Beginning of Infinity
One thing your brain is good at is forgetting. It will never hold on to information that’s not important.
– Justin Sung
Don’t look at my feet; I come from hell. Look at my soul; I am heading toward the stars.
– Zab G. Andrade
The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay.
– Garrison Keillor
If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
– Maya Angelou
Our minds are tortured and twisted because we are making such tremendous effort – to live, to do, to act, to think. Effort in any form must be a distortion.
– Krishnamurti
Thought is a beacon not a life-raft, and to confuse the functions is tragic.
– R.P. Blackmur
As the body is distinct from the clothes it wears, the soul is distinct from the body it inhabits.
– Shrimad Rajchandra, Atmasiddhi
If you want to know why everyone feels defeated and demoralized, it’s because art and literature and theater and natural splendor, all the things that gave life meaning, have been stripped from public life. We live in a culture that gives ugliness instead of beauty, scrolling instead of poetry, and we are starving for both.
– Boze Herrington
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
– Santiago Ramón y Cajal
The simplest definition of trauma is that it’s a life experience we didn’t have the mental and/or physical and/or emotional capacity to deal with and the psyche was wounded in the process.
– James Hillman
It does not take a genius to know that the whole world is bullshit. But you all do not get it.
You are still like the salesman, you can always think of a circumstance in which you might be fulfilled.
You never get the point! You do not get the point about the world because you do not get the point about yourself.
– Adi Da Samraj
When told the simple truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is within him, the Christian is not satisfied and will read far-fetched meanings into the statement. Mature minds alone can grasp the simple truth in all its nakedness.
– Ramana Maharshi
Greatness happens when the person with the wild imagination collaborates with the person who knows how to get things done.
– Simon Sinek
It is pointless trying to know where the Way leads. Take the first step, the rest will come.
– Rumi
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
– John Keats
Divinity is within you, not in concepts or books.
– Hermann Hesse
Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity. We have to think about what land means.
– Robin Kimmerer
The sage does not collect precious things.
He does not hold on to ideas.
He brings men back to what they have lost.
– Lao Tzu
He amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.
– Roberto Bolaño
Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.
– George Berkeley
How heavy is a common glass of water?
The weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long I hold it.
If I hold it for a minute, it’s no biggie.
If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm.
If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralyzed.
In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.
The stresses and worries in life are like that glass of water.
Think about them for a while and nothing happens.
Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt.
And if you think about them all day long, you will feel frozen – incapable of doing anything.
So surrender your tears and let go. The more you cry the more evolved you will become.
Remember water is the sacred gift of life and its where we came from.
– Glass of Water Theory
LIBERTY
by Robert Hunter
Saw a bird with a tear in his eye
Walking to New Orleans my oh my
Hey, now, Bird, wouldn’t you rather die
Than walk this world when you’re born to fly?
If I was the sun, I’d look for shade
If I was a bed, I would stay unmade
If I was a river I’d run uphill
If you call me you know I will
If you call me you know I will
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
Say what I mean and I don’t give a damn
I do believe and I am who I am
Hey now Mama come and take my hand
Whole lotta shakin’ all over this land
If I was an eagle I’d dress like a duck
Crawl like a lizard and honk like a truck
If I get a notion I’ll climb this tree
or chop it down and you can’t stop me
Chop it down and you can’t stop me
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
Went to the well but the water was dry
Dipped my bucket in the clear blue sky
Looked in the bottom and what did I see?
The whole damned world looking back at me
If I was a bottle I’d spill for love
Sake of mercy I’d kill for love
If I was a liar I’d lie for love
Sake of my baby I’d die for love
Sake of my baby I’d die for love
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
I’m gonna find my own way home
I went to one of Jung’s grandchildren, Dieter Baumann for analysis to begin with and then, at one point, we became very friendly. He said, ‘let’s visit Jung’s house in Bollingen’, and so he and I went there, and we opened the door of the little Stone House and went in, and I saw this funny book called the Dao De Jing where he had lived and where he had eaten, on his little table. That’s how I started to practice and learn about Taoism from Jung’s book, that he left behind Taoism for me is very very, very, very close to physics, nobody knows that. It’s about what’s happening, it’s about throwing a coin for example and watching it, that’s the essence of process work: watching what’s happening spontaneously and following it. So Taoism, from Jung and Dao came process working.
– Arnold Mindell
after IHF
When I have watched football
for ninety minutes I feel lousy –
Not so when I have played for an hour:
The players inherit the party
While the watchers wear themselves out and
sit on sofas alone, and glower.
– Alec Finlay
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?!
– Jack Kerouac
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
– Marshall McLuhan
If wokeness is un-American, then everything I have is not because of America, but in spite of it.
– Christopher Newman
Look carefully around you and recognize the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those who draw you to that.
– Rumi
The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had them.
– Robert Kincaid
He who learns but does not practice is like he who ploughs but does not sow.
– Saadi Shirazi
THE BRITISH PHONE BOOTH
I’m stuck inside one of those old red British phone booths from the past. In fact, the only time I hear about phone booths nowadays is when I’m watching boxing and the announcer says, “it’s been one hell of a phone booth fight.” Outside of the phone booth is rain and fog. No one notices me inside the phone booth. Maybe I like it, after all? Nevertheless, I pick up the phone to call for help. My mother in California answers on the other line. “Try to smash the glass with your fists,” she says. I smash the glass, and London fog bleeds into the booth. I crawl out of the phone booth, like a snake. I transform into a Shakespearean marionette, tights, trunks, facial hair and all. I recite the famous sonnets to the eager crowd that has gathered. I’m visible again. I take a bow.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
Always know when to let go. When a thought is bringing you more misery than peace, let go the thought; when a person is bringing more pain than joy to your life, let go… You cannot be your best if you lack joy and peace.
– Brigitte Nicole
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
– Albert Einstein
There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.
– Jack Kerouac
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.
– Aravind Adiga
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.
– Lao Tzu
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
– Aimé Césaire
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
– Toni Morrison
As we learn to bow,
we discover that the heart holds more freedom
and compassion than we could imagine.
– Jack Kornfield
All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.
– Winston Churchill
I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness.
– Walt Whitman
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
– John Adams
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
– John Steinbeck
Spirit is indeed non-rational; but it is trans, not pre. It transcends but includes reason; it does not regress and exclude it.
– Ken Wilber
LIVINGSTON SUITE
in memory of T.J. Huth
Shorn of nature,
here but in small supply,
townspeople adore their dogs.
Our dogs have never lived
in a town. Neither have I
since 1967. I adore
the puzzlement of our dogs.
Each morning I walk four blocks
to this immense river,
surprised that it’s still there,
that it won’t simply disappear
into the ground like the rest of us.
In the burnt July air
the strange cool odor
of sprinkler water
creating its own little breeze
in the Livingston Park
where there are twelve rings for playing
horseshoes built before the fathers of lies
built the clouds above our heads.
In 1968 when I was first here
there was a cool scent of pines
and melting snow from the mountains
carried by a southwind through the river’s
canyon. The scent is still here,
the sure fresh odor of the West.
A concert in the park on the 4th of July sponsored
by the networks in New York. Someone named Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams Junior not Senior, and my old favorite, Los Lobos. As a claustrophobe I can’t walk the four blocks into the crowds but from my studio I can hear the Latino music wafting through maple trees, imagining I’m at our winter casita near Patagonia, Arizona, on the Mexican border, the music so much closer to love and death than our own, the heart worn on the sleeve, the natural lament of flowers, the moon visible. Smiling skeletons are allowed to dance and the gods draw closer to earth, the cash registers drowned out in the flight of birds, the sound of water.
– Jim Harrison
A Murmuring was heard above the Spheres of Fine Matter, it quivered through the Great Pillar, and branch by branch, under the World Tree.
– Ronald Johnson
As long as you accept the criteria of the system, you are its prisoner.
– E.F. Schumacher
Once you have met a true human being, let him not disappear from the horizon of your heart.
– Rumi
Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
– Sylvia Plath
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
– Matsuo Bashō
If your ancestors could see you now,
they would probably stare for a while.
Not because of the phone in your hand, or the car on your drive, or the light that appears with the flick of a switch.
But because of the things that make you ache.
They would watch you stand in front of a mirror, pulling at your clothes, studying your reflection and finding fault in a face that carries every one of them.
They would wonder why you apologise for taking up space, why you hide parts of yourself, and why you measure your worth against strangers.
They would not understand why you call yourself ugly when your body is doing exactly what bodies have always done: carrying you through another day.
These were people who woke before sunrise to find food. Who feared winters that lasted too long. Who worked with cracked hands and tired bones, hoping simply to make it through.
Some fought wars. Some fought for causes that let you live. Some crossed oceans. Some crossed bridges so you never had to cross them. Some built dreams for the future and some buried dreams so their children could have chances they never did.
And all of them, whether they knew it or not, were passing a torch.
Through hunger and hardship. Through success and sacrifice. Through every impossible thing they survived.
They carried it forward until it reached you.
And now here you are.
Worried about wrinkles. About numbers on scales. About whether people like you. About whether you’ve achieved enough by now.
And perhaps they would place a hand on your shoulder and gently remind you:
We did not come this far for you to spend your life at war with yourself.
We fought for warmth, so you could rest. We searched for food, so you could be nourished. We demanded rights, so you could be free. We endured, so you could live.
Not perfectly. Not beautifully. Not impressively.
Just fully.
So if your ancestors could see you now, I think they would be proud.
Not because you have everything figured out.
But because after thousands of years of storms survived and battles endured, their story is still breathing.
Breathing.
Breathing.
Breathing.
Through you.
– Becky Hemsley
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
– George MacDonald
If there was ever a reason for a judge to sanction prosecutors, it’s prosecuting someone with a felony charge for touching paint.
– Andrew Gatto
There are many similarities between being an American and being a Buddhist. Both call upon us to take responsibility for our thoughts, our speech, and our actions.
– Reverend Earl Ikeda
Maybe I’m not making big changes in the world, but if I have somehow helped or encouraged somebody along the journey, then I’ve done what I’m called to do.
– Sr. Thea Bowman
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.
– Marshall McLuhan, Take Today
You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.
You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.
But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.
– Robert Penn Warren, Prophecy
A beautiful and profound post on the practice of “Tonglen”
– as taught by Chögyam Trungpa
notes taken by Ken Friedman
“JUST DO IT VERY NAIVELY”
…….”We’ve been introduced to the sitting practice of meditation. And, as we “sit and sit and sit and sit” [Trungpa Rinpoche’s words], at some point, we begin to settle down. Whew! What a relief! But, that’s just the beginning. Because, when we walk out of our shrine room, the phenomenal world will present itself, and frequently in ways that are unsettling. When that happens, our experience of peace and calm may be threatened, and we might feel awkward, irritated and confused. And, despite all of the dharma talks we’ve heard, despite all of our training, we might recoil from what’s in front of us: we make a face, we hold tight, we try to reject our world.
According to the “Backwards Ati teachings”, we could take a different approach. Since what’s in front of you couldn’t possibly be otherwise at that moment, instead of rejecting your world, you could invite the phenomenal world to come in; you could allow yourself to be touched by the pain and the suffering of others. When you do that, you see that there’s nothing to be afraid of; you could let go and fill the entire space with tenderness, affection and love. Trungpa Rinpoche once said [to me]: “Learning to love is the most difficult thing to do. But, to begin with, you don’t have to be so touchy.”
Of course, we’re now talking about the practice of tonglen.
As students on the path, we try to possess, to hold on to, our experience of basic goodness. Just like in our Red Cross training, we try to take in the good and breathe out the bad. Here, in tonglen, you apply the reverse logic: you take in the pain and the confusion of others, and you give others the best of what you’ve experienced – rigpa, mere knowing – right up to this very moment today. When you live in that way, you never let people down.
In the practice of tonglen, you breathe in the problems, the anger, the anguish of others; you take in their grudge, their resentment, completely. When you do that, said the Vidyadhara, “something happens; it works.” There’s a switch, which Trungpa Rinpoche called “the great switcheroo.” Your samsaric mind, your projections, fall apart, and there’s a “direct experience of luminosity, innate wisdom mind…The darkness that we live in, which comes from grasping at the dharmas of self and others, can collapse, like the knots of a coiled snake releasing themselves.” Therefore, we can radiate a sense of freedom, a sense of liberation, to others. That is the essence of tonglen.
The Secret to Tonglen Practice: Just Do It Very Naively.
Trungpa Rinpoche called tonglen, “Getting the inner scoop on Buddha’s mind at its best.” “Just do it very naively,” he said, “and you will find out.” That is the secret to tonglen practice – to do it very naively. The bringing in, the dissolving of other people’s problems into oneself, is complete and thorough, and the sending out is also complete. There’s complete letting go, just like with the outbreath in the sitting practice. You breathe in any sense of problem, of me-ness; and, when you breathe out, you drop any sense of pettiness, your concern for “what’s in it for me.” When you do that, you discover a golden world, a whole world of richness you can share with others.
Why? Because, at this point on the path, “others” are still just your version of others; “Joe Schmidt” is just your version of Joe Schmidt: “There is no Joe Schmidt. There is just your version of ‘Joe,’” your projection of “other, which is something we use to maintain the illusion of a so-called “self.” When you take in the pain, the confusion, the torment, of others, it is actually your projections about those people that are coming back to you. And, when you take your projection all the way in, back to the source, so to speak, what you discover is emptiness of concept – shunyata! Why? Because it was just your projection; it was your projection of Joe as being “evil,” as being your enemy. When you see that, the whole game of “this and that,” “friend and enemy,” falls apart; your conceptual world dissolves, and you see Joe’s buddha-nature. Therefore, you can see the situation more clearly; you can see how to practice the paramitas bluntly on the spot.
How to Practice Tonglen
Here’s how to do the practice:
First, take good head and shoulders; sit up straight with good posture.
Then, you flash absolute bodhichitta: There’s a short glimpse of openness, which you can use as a launching pad. You’re not trying to manufacture a compassionate state of mind; you’re not trying to cultivate a particular type of experience. But there’s very short, abrupt sudden gasp, which cuts through any tendency toward spiritual materialism. [If you have received the nature-of mind transmission, this is where to apply those instructions.]
One very important point: You continue to flash throughout the practice – that’s very important. Any time you notice that your mind has wandered, if you realize that you’ve been dwelling on thoughts, take head and shoulders, look out, and open your eyes just a little bit wider. And then come back to applying the instructions on tonglen.
You start by taking in black and sending out white: At the beginning, you’re not visualizing or working with a particular person or situation, but you take in the feeling, the texture, of all-pervasive blackness and sludge. You breathe in black, hot and heavy, and it dissolves into you. You’re not just watching the blackness from a distance; instead, you identify with the blackness – it’s very thorough; it’s very blunt. The feeling of blackness, of hopelessness, comes in from everywhere. You take it in; you are completely black from head to toe. You take in whatever is uncomfortable and disgusting. There’s a quality of nausea or revulsion.
Then, there’s a gap, and you breathe out basic goodness, a sense of freedom from obstacles. The outbreath is actually the same as the outbreath in the sitting practice: there’s a complete letting go. There’s out-dissolve, and then gap, shunyata. The Vidyadhara said: “There’s no me-ness in there anymore.” Why not? Because your projection, your make-believe world, fell apart. You dropped your tight preoccupation with yourself, and therefore you can give out.
The Vidyadhara (Trungpa) said: “You are changing the atmosphere; [it’s] like suddenly turning on the air conditioner or opening the window in the wintertime.” So, there’s hot and heavy (taking in) and cold and light (giving out). You should have a tangible feeling, an actual visual sense of it: Rinpoche said this was very important. You personally, physically feel it. You experience the texture, the heaviness, with the in-breath, and the coolness, the fresh breeze of delight, with the out. You take in the blackness through all of your pores; there’s a feeling of claustrophobia, imprisonment, no relief. Then you breathe out basic goodness; you expand out as much as you can.
So, you begin by working with texture: you do that for about one-third of your tonglen session, so for about the first ten minutes of a 30-minute session of tonglen. Then, you begin to pick up on specific content. You breathe in Joanne Schmidt’s suffering, and you breathe out the absence of that suffering to Joanne. You might think that Michael is depressed: you breathe in Michael’s depression, and you breathe out the absence of depression to Michael. If you know someone that is sick with the flu, you take in that person’s virus, and breathe out the absence of any kind of illness to that person.
One other important point: you can and should do tonglen for yourself. When you see yourself as being a problem, you are actually experiencing yourself as “other.” So, you can breathe in your own problems, your own neurosis, and you breathe out a complete absence of conflict to yourself.
But there’s still more to go: after a brief period of focusing on a specific person’s problem, you switch from doing tonglen for just one person, and you begin working with all sentient beings. So, for example, you might breathe in Martha’s financial difficulties, and then breathe out freedom from financial problems to Martha. Then, after a few moments, you switch from focusing only on Martha, and you breathe in the money problems of all sentient beings and you breathe out freedom from money hangups to everyone. You keep switching back and forth between a particular person’s problem and then working with the same problem as experienced by all sentient beings. Then, at the very end of your session, you take in all of the suffering experienced by sentient beings, and you breathe out the complete freedom from suffering to others.
Tonglen is the Simplest Practice
You can choose anyone and anything. You don’t have to worry about whether your perception of a person is accurate; you don’t have to worry about whether that person is really an aggressive person or not. Remember, what you’re actually doing is breathing in your perception of that person as aggressive. And then, once again, the outbreath is always the same. The absence of jealousy or the absence of aggression or money hangups—they are all the same. There’s always out-dissolve-gap. You take in the problems and obstacles of others and send out buddha nature, rigpa, complete open space.
Another key point: You never run out of content. Tonglen is the simplest practice. If you feel it’s a problem because you can’t think of anything to breathe in, you breathe in “not being able to think of anything to take in,” and breathe out a complete lack of difficulty with the practice. If I feel that I’m doing it wrong, I would take in “doing it wrong” to myself and breathe out a complete mastery of the practice to “Ken.” So, you never run out of “material.” You work with whatever arises in your mind – if it seems like a problem, there’s no evaluation; you just take it in.
– via Dugald Sinclair and Jangchup Garma
The uselessness of the word is evident. I would like to make this piece of paper shriek and dance and laugh but the keys just strike it harmlessly and we settle for just a fraction of the whole.
– Charles Bukowski
The white expanse of the page is terribly and exquisitely silent. It lies before us like a frozen lake, completely indifferent to the brilliant chaotic skater of human consciousness. We approach it with the grandest and most predatory intentions. We wish to split the frost. We seek a phrase that shriek with the magenta tint of an agonized sunset, dance with weightless grace, and laugh with the cruel silver chime of a clock in an empty ballroom. We long for the text to become a living breathing canvas of nerve.
Look closely at the result. The heavy iron arms of the machine, those rigid mechanical pedants, strike their uniform rhythmic blows. They are harmless. They merely stain the sheet. What emerges is a pale pressed flower, a dry specimen pinned down by a clumsy grammar. We are forced by the very nature of this flat medium to settle for a mere fraction, a ghost, a dusty silhouette of the magnificent whole.
The writer remains an eternal exile stranded on the shore of a monochrome vocabulary, forever watching the vivid unwritten world wave from across an impassable sea of ink.
To you, dear reader, I pose this: When you close a truly magnificent book, do you feel that the author successfully made the paper dance, or are we all simply haunted by the beautiful untouchable specter of what they were forced to leave behind?
– Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. Reality itself is gorgeous, it is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wowee!
And all those stars, if you look out in the skies, is a fireworks display, like you see on the 4th of July, which is a great occasion for celebration. The universe is a celebration. It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee.
This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now, and instead of calling it “work,” realize that this is play.
– Alan Watts
I am, at heart, a gentleman.
– Marlene Dietrich
I am a place, a place where things come together,
then fly apart.
Look at the fields disappearing,
look at the distant hills,
look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night,
which has already come,
though the sun continues to stand at my door.
– Mark Strand
Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive, completely immersed in myself, I did not even know whether trees grew along the way, nor how tall they were, or whether they had leaves. When I awakened my attention, however, every tree immediately came to me. This must be taken quite literally. Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement—even if it was almost motionless—in my direction. I could indicate its trunk, and the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away. By and by something else became clear to me, and this can never be found in books. The world exerts pressure on us from the distance.
The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.
This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.
– Jacques Lusseyran
There is no whole truth, but this is what we have,
And it goes on
Beyond impact, beyond reach, beyond recall…
– James Dickey
This Land Is Your Land
by Woody Guthrie
This land is your land, this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
And saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me
I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me, a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me
When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me
This land is your land and this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice come chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me.
A poet is a fellow who
spends his time thinking
about what it is that’s
wrong, and although he
knows he can never quite
find out what this wrong
is, he goes right on
thinking it out
and writing it down.
A poet is a blind optimist.
The world is against him for
many reasons. But the
poet persists. He believes
that he is on the right track,
no matter what any of his
fellow men say. In his
eternal search for truth, the
poet is alone.
He tries to be timeless in a
society built on time.
– Jack Kerouac
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
– Abraham Lincoln
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
– Thomas Jefferson
What is the rule of honor to be observed by a power so strongly and so advantageously situated as this Republic is? Of course I do not expect it meekly to pocket real insults if they should be offered to it. But, surely, it should not, as our boyish jingoes wish it to do, swagger about among the nations of the world, with a chip on its shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody’s face. Of course, it should not tamely submit to real encroachments upon its rights.
But, surely, it should not, whenever its own notions of right or interest collide with the notions of others, fall into hysterics and act as if it really feared for its own security and its very independence. As a true gentleman, conscious of his strength and his dignity, it should be slow to take offense. In its dealings with other nations it should have scrupulous regard, not only for their rights, but also for their self-respect.
With all its latent resources for war, it should be the great peace power of the world. It should never forget what a proud privilege and what an inestimable blessing it is not to need and not to have big armies or navies to support. It should seek to influence mankind, not by heavy artillery, but by good example and wise counsel. It should see its highest glory, not in battles won, but in wars prevented. It should be so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinctively turn to it as their mutual friend and the natural adjuster of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of the world’s peace.
This is not a mere idealistic fancy. It is the natural position of this great republic among the nations of the earth. It is its noblest vocation, and it will be a glorious day for the United States when the good sense and the self-respect of the American people see in this their “manifest destiny.”
It all rests upon peace. Is not this peace with honor? There has, of late, been much loose speech about “Americanism.” Is not this good Americanism? It is surely today the Americanism of those who love their country most. And I fervently hope that it will be and ever remain the Americanism of our children and our children’s children.
– Carl Schurz
—What! To prolong our lives must we submit
to the rule of these defilers of our house?
—No, it is not to be endured. No, death would be better,
for that would be a milder lot than tyranny.
– Aeschylus
Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds.
– Mary Oliver
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive… Together.
– Frank Herbert, New World or No World
Breath
by Philip Levine
Today
in this high clear room
of the world, I squat
to the life of rocks
jewelled in the stream
or whispering
like shards. What fears
are still held locked
in the veins till the last
fire, and who will calm
us then under a gold sky
that will be all of earth?
Everything is connected to something. But not everything is connected to everything. The differences are vital.
– Sophie Strand
You cannot separate peace and freedom. Because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
– Abraham Lincoln
…but they say extreme fear drives the fearful to deep and continual slumber. Sleeping, she sleeps; waking, she sleeps; walking, she sleeps; and eating, she sleeps.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Under the seams runs the pain.
– Anne Carson
Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world…
– Joanna Macy
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
– G.K. Chesterton
The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.
– Lacan
We’re all so desperate to be understood, we forget to be understanding.
– Beau Taplin
Today I am tempted to begin life in a new language.
– Canetti
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible.
– Georges Bernanos
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.
– Virginia Woolf
…I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.
– G.K. Chesterton
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
– Doris Lessing
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
– Victor Frankl
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
– Gore Vidal
A sense of humor, especially a capacity to laugh at one’s own idiosyncrasies, has long been considered a core element of mental health.
– Nancy McWilliams
A mind that is full of conclusions is a dead mind, it is not a living mind. A living mind is a free mind, learning, never concluding.
– Krishnamurti
Remember always, that most of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
July’s grass burnt over
the gardens are factories.
It is the inexpressible sadness
of a family sitting down to dinner
at a card table under the shade tree
behind their house. This is not enough
and it is not too much.
The screen door slams as the children
go indoors to watch television.
Their parents sit smoking
and talking over the dishes
hardly noticing the buses
rushing past them on the highway.
It is that moment where everything will stay
but never long enough.
– William Corbett, This Is Not Enough
What an age! Every one is dying,
everything is dying, and the earth is
dying also, eaten up by the sun and
the wind. I don’t know where I get
the courage to keep on living in the
midst of these ruins. Let us love
each other to the end.
– George Sand
It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity, a condition of survival. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.
– Adlai Stevenson
I am flowing again—I have lost my fears,
my anguishes. I have multiple desires,
curiosities, interests.
I can be everywhere.
– Anais Nin
Whiskey, wine, beer
tonight. Expected sleep
I don’t want to go home
wherever that is.
August before you know it.
– Bill Corbett
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
A lot of people keep it real intellectual as a way of avoiding the deeper parts of themselves.
– Nika Solé
How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!
– John Wain
Have patience with yourself, for you are your only obstacle. The way leads through yourself beyond yourself.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
[In the modern world] … the outer chains have simply been put inside man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion -apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free.
– Erich Fromm
Prayer, meditation, chanting, singing, dancing, and drumming are all wonderful ways to free yourself from the limited world of the mind, and enter into a silent and dynamic communion with God. Be creative. Find your own way of relating to God.
– Leonard Jacobson
Today, we constantly produce ourselves. This production of self is noisy. Creating stillness means withdrawing.
– Byung-Chul Han
Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.
– Eckhart Tolle
We are already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
– Richard Rohr
I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.
– Carl Jung
More people crazy in love doing revolutionary things. That’s what the world needs.
– Nika Solé
Your book knowledge is useful to begin with, but soon it must be given up for direct experience, which by its very nature is inexpressible. Words can be used for destruction also; of words images are built, by words they are destroyed.
– Nisargadatta
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
– Matt Haig
What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood?
– Lin Yutang
Stillness is the altar of Spirit. When the mind is still, God speaks.
– Sri Ramakrishna
When anyone has too much, he can’t desire anything. Or he ends up wanting the few things he cannot have.
– Costanza Casati
A people who lose their own framework for understanding reality often begin interpreting themselves through the categories and values of those who dominate them.
– Dr. Amos Wilson
When you feel the suffering of every living thing
within your own heart, that is true Consciousness.
– Bhagavad Gita
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
– Bertrand Russell
Understanding depends on the way one listens.
– Krishnamurti
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, so that so that you will not be dependent on anyone.
– Thessaloniki
I am not a word of America.
I am not an object of missionary charity.
I am one of the people who built the country.
– James Baldwin
In late-stage capitalism that fetishizes productivity while actively producing health poverty, no amount of institutional access is enough.
– Daisy Lafarge, On Illness and Disability in Contemporary Art
True beauty is the radiance of a soul that has found its center; it is a light that does not fade with age, but grows brighter with every year.
– G.I. Gurdjieff
What is bad for the heart is good for the art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
– Jandy Nelson
Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy.
– Wynn Bullock
It’s time to start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream – the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension.
– Abhijit Naskar
One would like one’s life to be borne on the onward wave and not the receding one —the flow and not the ebb.
– George Eliot
It is very important to accept your own darkness when you want to grow in the light.
– Pradip Bendkule
We are not to take lightly the growth of our minds, and the forming of our beliefs.
– Abraham Lincoln
I lift up my face to the summer sky
The sound of larks And the feel of dirt
To all that keeps making sense
In senseless times.
– Carrie Newcomer
fuck fireworks.
i’ve seen galaxies in her eyes
after she howls my name
like a war cry
and collapses
into the kind of freedom
the founding fathers never dared
to imagine.
– Christopher Sexton
philosophers talk about god.
poets taste her.
– Christopher Sexton
Just a reminder that Mary Oliver’s
own answer to her question,
“What is it you plan to do with
your one wild and precious life?”
was to stroll idly through the fields
noticing things.
The question out of context could
appear to be about achieving
more — it’s not.
– Jessica Kantrowitz
A hand full of sand is an anthology of the universe.
– David McCord
The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck, and we bind ourselves to the wheel of repetition, because we refuse to reimagine our situation. We cling to the familiar, not daring to give up what we are or have been for what we are meant to become. To address our challenges, we need to draw on extraordinary sources of information and invest our energy and attention in a form of active imagination that dares to re-vision everything.
– Robert Moss
When we refuse the Whole of Life, we create darkness.
– Mark Nepo
It is better to get rid of the problem and keep the person than to get rid of the person and keep the problem.
– Harville Hendrix
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
– William Wordsworth
You’re Not A Poet Til
the State Betrays You
by Darius Simpson
writing a poem is to punching a cop
what punching a cop is to voting blue
it’s like comparing apples to punching a cop
unc, this whiskey is callin me your name again
blood in the august sun dares me to jump
dirty knife in the sink sings about vengeance
untouched ammo screams about loneliness
am i a punk for writing the state’s mortality
can an empire bent on death ever die
do pigs fly to hell or is hell already in them
will angel wings make me a better fugitive
devil on both shoulders says squeeze
we all somebody’s child tryna get home
you’re not a poet til the state betrays you
Reality as a whole — past or present — just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion.
– Jason Mott, Hell of a Book
Detach yourself from everything that makes your mind restless. Renounce everything that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, make yourself worthy of it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Do not look at my outward poverty; look at the treasure hidden in my soul.
– Rumi
What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.
– Marcus Aurelius
Literature and art, which are sometimes seen as the realm of the superfluous (…) are part of the symbolic, and the symbolic brings with it the quality of communicating and showing us the beautiful and the terrifying.
– Ana Luísa Amaral
It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
– Zadie Smith
Find someone who embraces your light yet doesn’t fear your darkness.
– Dahi Tamara Koch
The mind is a magician; it creates a world that does not exist.
– Shams Tabrizi
Love does not arise out of light, out of consciousness. It bypasses these safer grounds. Love is an earthquake of the soul that precedes our frail attempts at order, always threatening to destroy our illusions of control…
– Veronica Goodchild
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
– George Santayana
Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which is constituted of technology, science, production, “productivity,” and “consumption.”
And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential…
– Julius Evola, Work – The Demonic Nature of Economy
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.
– George Henry Lewes
I always like to repeat the beautiful saying of Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist of the 20th century: “My definition of demon is an angel that was not recognized as so. Rather, it is a power, which you denied expression, and you repressed. So, with all of its’ energy repressed, it starts to grow and becomes extremely dangerous”.
– Roberto Lima Netto
If you have a golf ball size consciousness, when you read a book, you’ll have a golf ball size understanding… but if you can expand that consciousness, then read the book: more understanding.
– David Lynch
When they no longer love you, you will know it, even if they don’t tell you. You will feel it deep within your soul, because indifference never goes unnoticed.
– Julio Cortázar
At Last the New Arriving
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Like the horn you played in Catholic school
the city will open its mouth and cry
out. Don’t worry ’bout nothing. Don’t mean
no thing. It will leave you stunned
as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who’s told he won the whole damn purse.
It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you. It will rise
like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands. She’ll come back,
heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.
Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys
won’t kill you for it. Shake your head.
Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. What a lucky sack of stars.
All the books of the world will not bring you happiness, but build a secret path
toward your heart.
– Hermann Hesse
THE RIVER AGAIN AND AGAIN
If I could show you how repetition
helps us to understand the truth.
If we stayed with each other long enough
to see the seasons return, to see the young animals
and the opening of peonies and summer heat.
Then we could make sense of the hawk’s calm
or the deer all lowering their heads
again and continuing to eat.
And we would know each other sometimes
with a love that touches indifference.
– Linda Gregg
As Planned
by Frank O’Hara
After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
Often we tell ourselves, “Don’t just sit there, do something!” But when we practice awareness, we discover that the opposite may be more helpful: “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Anger is the guardian of
something alive longing for presence.
– Matt Licata
The darkness was so complete that it might have been mahogany.
– G.K. Chesterton
Each one of us is
a triumvirate being-at once
the union of body, soul, and
all that lies within.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO
After Mary Oliver
leave your city, your job, your life and eat,
pray, love yourself into oblivion to be happy.
You do not have to burn it all to the ground
and bossbitch, exodus, manifest your way
into a life worth living. You only have to let
the swell of what is most true spill from you
not as a tsunami, but a bayou: a slow-moving
arrival, poorly defined yet lush with soul.
– Elise Powers
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The silence of the night was profound, and the shadows of the houses seemed to take on strange, fantastic shapes.
– Edgar Allan Poe
However, please note, when we talk about crossing from the shore of suffering to the shore of enlightenment, we are talking about duality—two opposite shores—which we have said is not really wisdom.
Prajna accepts no duality. As we will see later, in prajna, when we reach the other shore, we see that the true nature of all things is emptiness, and in emptiness there was/is/will be no river to cross. All the crossing is just a fleeting phenomenon of the mind.
– Trần Đình Hoành
I don’t want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning, or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done.
– Rachel Aviv
the gentle architecture of staying
you didn’t fix me.
you didn’t need to.
you just held the shattered pieces
like they weren’t broken.
like they were art.
– Justin Hatchett
I’m reading on the couch
when she calls, asks for me by name.
I smile at her scripted intimacy,
imagine her cubicle with photos of pets,
the long bend of light
on her lacquered nails.
– Brett Garcia Myhren, Telemarketer
He who is persistent will realize God.
So try your best to make meditation
a regular experience in your life.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
The greatest minds are the most tormented because they cannot unsee what they have seen.
– Friedrich Nietzsche.
Islanders the world over are born for exile. Islands give you a privileged childhood and then, once they’ve made you what you are, leave you with no place to express it.
– Donald Macleod
Buddhists say that life is a river, and that we navigate it on a raft toward our final destination. The river has its current, speed, reefs, eddies, and other obstacles that we cannot control, but we have an oar to steer the vessel across the water. The quality of the journey depends on our skill.
– Isabel Allende
Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.
– Richard Rohr
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
– Marcus Aurelius
Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Elitism is an enemy of socialism and of the working class.
– Kwame Nkrumah
The sage is like the ocean; he is deep, calm, and full of treasures.
– Ashtavakra
The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms, and the bee comes.
– Mark Nepo
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
– Orson Scott Card
For me fiction is a way of asking: what if things were other than they are? And a central component of that is to ask: what if I was different than I am? I have always found the practice of writing fiction far more an escape from self than an exploration of it.
– Zadie Smith, The I Who Is Not Me
In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most.
– Epicurus
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
– Baruch Spinoza
The pursuit of power is the denial of love and the source of all violence.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long – he has existed long.
– The Stoics: The Philosophy of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate.
– John Adams
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble… they can only be outgrown.
– Carl Jung
Your ancestors didn’t become powerful by escaping the body.
They learned to listen to it until it became an antenna.
– Nagomi
Poetry isn’t a place of answers and easy solutions. It’s a place where we can admit to an unknowing, own our private despair, and still, sometimes, practice beauty.
– Ada Limón
The world is a shadow that vanishes when the Sun of the Spirit rises in the heart.
– Rumi
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.
– Paulo Coelho
[America is] lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
– Kimberly Jones
You boldly settle all the important questions. But tell me, my dear boy, isn’t it because you are young and the questions of the world have not hurt you yet?
– Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
A person who is escaping from reality will always feel the terror of it.
– Alan Watts
Die to one pleasure, to one enchanting remembrance, without argument, without motive, just to drop it. Do it sometime and you will see what is involved in it, how frightened you are to have a mind that is constantly renewing itself.
– Krishnamurti
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?
– Henry James
The World is burning – data centers being built – so many people functioning at the lowest spectrum of frequency – not realizing that this is a War we have to personally win from within. We could overthrow the Deep state and dismantle the dark tech and weaponization of frequency, if we could raise our own and realize we are Elemental beings in a physical vessel with access to the Multi-dimensional, just like this Earth.
The Deep state wouldn’t bother with social engineering (mirroring geo-engineering), if all they needed to control humans was dark tech. They require our consent, our loosh, our panic, our dependency on the system. They want us to be in divide and conquer and love seeing us pit against each other and wasting our time posturing our egos cause we might get some things. I don’t see us truly coming together or doing what is necessary. I am so grateful for my close friends, animals and children and those who really get it.
There is a place in each and every one of us, that knows how to heal and what these times are demanding and who know the true power we hold. Ego needs to be humble enough to allow the true power to shine through. When ego thinks its the power, it actually blocks the solution, because it acts arrogant and believes its right and others are wrong ~ it falls into competition and a war like mentality. When ego becomes the vehicle for the Soul to express itself through, the control matrix crumbles.
The system wants you to either abuse power and seek to control or belittle others, or feel powerless and in total self doubt, looking for a savior, or having a false sense of security. Ego needs to allow something greater to shine through – like the virtues of what it means to be a Christed being. Being assimilated into AI is for those who literally abandon that calling ~ void of being truly Soul centered.
Our Soul knows the way home, humans must learn to listen. That is why Souless and evil go hand in hand. False light, negative ego, service to self is what any negative agenda is made of. ITs not that complicated.
– Laura Eisenhower
Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves “the good and the just,” do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had power.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
before sunrise
even the robins trust
what cannot be seen
– Aoki
Resting imperturbably like a mountain is the secret view itself.
There is no doubt, and mental stirring is automatically absent.
– Tantra Without Letters
Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist. There is in that state no present, no past, nor future. It is beyond time. It is ever there.
– Ramana Maharshi
I do not believe the Earth is divided into
East and West. I believe the Earth is
divided into those allowed to destroy and
those forced to bear the consequences.
– Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini
Everything is already perfect.
And if you can accept that everything is already perfect,
the imperfection is a part of the perfection.
What’s to worry about?
– Alice Walker
And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time.
The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is.
If you try to correct the sorrows all you do its shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that?
You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with the joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.
– Joseph Campbell
Do you think you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation. Who can attain clarity and simplicity by avoiding the world?
– Lao Tzu
The single most liberating insight to come out of our collective work . . . [is that] the resisting or opposing force is never actually the problem to be overcome. Second force, or holy denying, is a legitimate and essential component in every new arising: no resistance, no new arising! That realization in and of itself radically rearranges the playing field, shifting the focus away from trying to eliminate the opposition and toward working collaboratively for a more spacious solution . . . The problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
when the eye stops the heart
What then are we to do
with all those moments
when the eye stops
the heart
That gesture there, that glint
of beauty going by
And the thought, Who will remember
it if I don’t?
That daub of heaven
on a half-lowered eye-
lid
– Vasiliki Katsarou
INSOMNIA
All over the world people can’t sleep.
In different times zones they’re lying awake
Bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
They worry about bills, they worry whether the shoes they just
bought are really too small.
One’s husband’s died, her son left for college
and she doesn’t know how to program the VCR.
Another was beaten by her husband
One is planning a getaway
One holding stolen goods.
One’s on the plaid couch in ICU.
His daughter, it turned out
Actually goes have a tumour
Even though the doctor said they’d do the MRI just to rule it out.
The woman on the other couch is snoring
which is strangely soothing
Evidence that people do sleep.
Some are lying on
Charisma sheets
Some in hammocks
Some in jail
Some under bridges
One is at the north pole studying the impact of pollution
A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover he once had in Dar es
Salaam and the jasmine
blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver pin fastened in her
hair at night.
Coincidentally, the lover, now in Rome, remembers looking out the
window over the sink
where she was washing dishes
And seeing him reading in the lawn chair
and she thought how perhaps for the first time she wasn’t lonely.
They’re all up.
some are too cold,
some too hot.
some hungry,
some in pain
Some are in hotels listening to people having sex in the next room
Some are crying
One the cat woke up and now she’s worried about the rash she
noticed in the evening and
wonders if her daughter who’s afraid to swim should be pushed
Some get up
Others stay in bed
They eat oreos, or drink wine
Or both
Many read
A few make Hallowe’en costumes
Some check their email
They try sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs
They listen to their clocks tick
Smartly, as a woman in high heels
Those who can, cling to their mates
An ear pressed to those neighboring lungs
Like a stethoscope hoping to catch a ride on the steady sleep
breath of the other
to be carried like a seed on the body of one who is able.
Right now in Japan dawn is coming, and everyone who’s been up all
night is relieved;
they can stop trying
In Guatemala though the insomniacs are just getting started
and have the whole night ahead of them.
It’s like a wave at the baseball stadium,
hands around the world.
So here’s a prayer for the wakeful
The souls who can’t rest as you lie with your eyes open or closed
May something comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze,
the smell of crushed mint rain on the roof,
Chopin’s Nocturnes your child’s birth a kiss, or even me—in my
chilly kitchen with my coat on—thinking of you
– Ellen Bass
A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
– Dresden James
I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains. I think them through daily, it doesn’t take long, thought moves so fast, but they are not only in my thought, not all.
– Samuel Beckett
…I was my own
storm once, so young
and eager to raise the sail
of my wanting, and I just wanted
to tell you I love this old boat,
this settled-in thing.
– Keith Leonard
Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth.
– Sarah Kendzior
If patriotism has to precipitate us into dishonor; if there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves; then why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or to remain, human?
– Jean-Paul Sartre
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
– William Faulkner
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I had come to a small village on the edge of the desert to follow an unlikely clue. Years before, I had read an enigmatic mention of a ‘monastery in Persia’ where visitors were said to weep spontaneously on entering a particular room. I had often wondered whether such a place might really exist and was skeptical of the universality of the claim. There are no monasteries in Iran, but there are shrines raised to the saints of the Sufi tradition, whose followers dedicated themselves to the life of the spirit. In one such place, a kindly dervish showed me to the shrine-room of the saint. I could not have guessed that I had found the place until, sitting there alone, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. Not with tears of either joy or pain, but of feeling in the grip of a presence, a force of unutterable goodness. Others have described a similar experience. Religious persuasion, or the lack of it, does not seem to be relevant. All testify to an encounter with an entity of overwhelming benevolence, and a feeling of having been overcome and reduced, momentarily, as if to dust.
– Jason Elliot, Mirrors of the Unseen
Teilhard believed that each person is a universe wherein the dust of experience is gathered into a unity.
– Ilia Delio
I spent much of the last year unable to write. When I tried to Listen to my interior, what I heard was a cacophony of accumulated voices telling me what a poem should be… should do — and, more disturbingly, what it shouldn’t.
– Leila Chatti
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good.
– William Faulkner
Your memory
once vibrant
tenderly disappearing
– Rachel Newcombe
Experience life in all possible ways-good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
– Osho
One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
What is normal is to digest with all the means that man has to digest.
– Gurdjieff
Fire
has no future. What a relief
for the fire.
– Selma Asotic
I’m so tired of wanting more.
– Tiana Clark
If you’re willing to recognize your mistakes, you massively tilt the odds in your favor.
– Shane Parrish
Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
– Joyce Carol Oates
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.
There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
– William James
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
– Anne Carson
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to. It’s not for them.
– Joubert Botha
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him.
– John Stuart Mill
Buddhist ritual’s are for overcoming pride and egotism. But clinging to ritual is a hindrance to awakening.
– @Buddhism_Now
all of us who are alive
have one life that is lived
and another life that is imagined,
and the only life we have
is this one that’s divided
between truth and error.
that said, nobody knows
how to explain which is truth
and which is error
– fernando pessoa
I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasure of my mind.
– Flann O’Brien
We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.
– Annie Dillard
In the land of elves…
“You are the many-petalled
melting point of repeating decimals …”
– Andrew Joron
Tolkien believed that the building of imaginary worlds is one of our highest callings as image-bearing children of God, and he bore that image well.
– Andrew Peterson
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
– David Foster Wallace
If you meditate for a few minutes every day and live in harmony, you will always live in heaven, and will carry your own portable paradise within you wherever you go.
– Paramhansa Yogananda
Some texts explain that emptiness is the ‘great seal’ or ‘Mahamudra’, but ‘Mahamudra’ is simply a name given to emptiness. The real Mahamudra is the union of great bliss and emptiness.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
All energy is vibration. Every cell in your body, every thought in your mind. Every feeling you have, every action you choose to take, is vibrating at a certain frequency and you can change the vibration.
– Chunyi Lin
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market.
He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange.
Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.
– Erich Fromm
Grace is within you; if it were external it would be useless. Grace is the Self; you are never out of its reach. Is there a moment when Grace is not operating in you?
– Ramana Maharshi
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
– Terence McKenna
When you only value what’s beyond your reach, all your friends are worthy of contempt.
– Kenneth Folk
Today on the Fourth, I am not waving the flag like a clean thing.
I am holding it like a shirt pulled from the river,
wrung out by mothers outside the Whipple building in January,
by aunties with thermoses,
by my boys who had to learn the vocabulary of riot gear
before they learned anything about girls.
I am celebrating the America that Minneapolis wore this winter.
You can keep the America that combs its hair for the cameras.
The brass-band America whose anthem just got botox.
You can cheer for the textbook eagle
that poses over a field of erased bones.
But as for me and my house, we are celebrating the America
that stood in the cold and would not stop saying “human.”
The America with Lake Street salt
crusted on the hem of its jeans.
The America with chapped hands
passing out cold coffee in paper cups.
The America with a Haitian grandma holding her blanket closed
like she was protecting the last ember
from the first fire God ever made.
I am celebrating the neighbors who became doors.
The bodies who became bridges.
The people who stared at the empire with its paperwork face
and said No.
Not here. Not this mother. Not this child.
Not while there is soup in the church basement.
Not while Minneapolis still has enough breath
to fog up the glass between cruelty and the beloved.
I am honoring the America
that gets kept from the postage stamps:
Somali mothers wearing winter like a second migration.
Mexican fathers holding their babies names
in their mouths like candles.
Black elders who hear the old machine revving up
before it even starts.
White neighbors learning that
solidarity left to a sign is not solidarity at all.
That’s why I bought fireworks and will get wild
and light up the sky in colors tonight.
Not for the empire that asks for papers.
But for the love that asks if the kids have eaten.
– Matt Moberg
The natural state of the relaxed brain is multidimensional attention. It does not need viewpoints, data, opinions, memory to be alert. When all the directions cease, an organic, non-directed watchfulness remains. This is the threshold of ‘I am.’
– Jean Klein
This is how I live: on a small street high up a hill. To the left of my house is a glacial erratic, to the right an empty house. In short: stone, me, emptiness.
– Gunnhild Øyehaug, (tr. Kari Dickson)
There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.
– Richard Powers
half moon
not everything unfinished
is incomplete
– Akari
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
– G.K. Chesterton
I walked into the ocean. Not to
drown but to be held by something reluctant
to let go.
– Leila Chatti
There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.
– Thomas Merton
Not knowing a precondition for being able to imagine. To imagine is not to figure out a solution to an emotional problem; it is to change the very terms of the dilemma.
– Thomas Ogden
bright stars
the smallest wish
feels seen
– Akari
‘Ambulator nascitur, non fit.’ [A walker is born, not made.]
– Henry David Thoreau
Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
– Criss Jami
There’s no governmental system that can correct evil as long as people remain as they are now.
– Leo Tolstoy
The next frontier for intelligent machines is to say, “I don’t know.”
And to stand there silent in that sacred humility.
– Kenneth Folk
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.
– Rebecca Solnit
What silence around a god! Wow do you hear within it
every change in the upwelling of the fountain’s jet
on the lingering water of the marble basin.
– Rilke
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.
– Anais Nin
”I have no desire to walk on water,” said Siddhartha. “Let the old Samanas satisfy themselves with such arts.”
– Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
All paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.
– William Irwin Thompson
Your greatest hallucination wasn’t on mushrooms. It was believing forty years at a desk was normal.
– Sileo Cael
I’ve experienced so much good and bad in my life that I can write forever.
– Bert McCracken
I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Capitalism isn’t in the constitution.
But “promote the general welfare” is.
– Jay Perry
Worldly affairs are all deceptive;
So I seek the Truth Divine.
Excitements and distractions are illusions;
So I meditate on the Non-dual Truth.
– Jetsun Milarepa
The Mosquito Knows
by D. H. Lawrence
The mosquito knows full well,
small as he is he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
… I feel that anyone who has encountered the dharma is the most privileged person in the world, and that’s more true as the world looks bleaker and bleaker. I think we’re living through pretty bleak times, and I don’t think they’re going to get better in the immediate future.
But to have the dharma just strikes me as being so extraordinary. I mean, what an extraordinary privilege to know that you have within you a refuge that nobody can ever touch. Nobody can take it away from you. It doesn’t matter how bad things get. That we have something inside that is really true refuge – to have that in my life makes my life extraordinary.
– Helen Tworkov
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is…
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
– Francis Bacon
We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.
– Gabriela Mistral
Unexpressed creativity…is poison to the human psyche. The malady that our species is collectively suffering from is, in essence, the fact that we are not connecting with, mobilizing and expressing our creative nature, which turns against us in self-and-other-destruction.
– Paul Levy
Sometimes an idea needs
10 years to figure itself out.
– Courtney Barnett
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.
– Howard Thurman
The idea that we do not have to do anything on our own is extremely wishful thinking.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The most divinely feminine thing a woman can do is destroy the patriarchy,
dismantle capitalism and eviscerate fascism.
– Nikita Gill
The interdependence of word and idea shows clearly that languages are not actually means of representing a truth already known, but rather of discovering the previously unknown. Their diversity is not one of sounds and signs, but a diversity of world perspectives… The sum of the knowable, as the field to be tilled by the human mind, lies among all languages, independent of them, in the middle. Man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his cognitive and sensory powers, that is, in a subjective manner.
– Wilhelm Von Humboldt
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
– Hilary Mantel
I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
– Beth Clark
Causes & Conditions
We’ll never know why, or how, the aspen tree
near the retreat center grew horizontally across
the creek, dug itself into the other side of the bank.
Or how the hostile man with the ink of enmity in
his heart became just that, and of who did or did
not love him. What happened so that some people
grew stone cold, so that they woke into their bodies
with a malicious discontent. So many things happen
in a life, so many ways a seed can grow, or not grow.
I have lived enough to know as much— each is a
world, a universe, a constellation of pains and joys.
Each is a suffering being worthy of our compassion,
regardless. So, what is left to do but forgive everybody,
and I mean everybody, by which I mean everybody.
Do not stoop to hateful accusations, no matter the
circumstance. Don’t become a victim of ugly language.
Do not let the causes of ignorance create conditions
that corrode your loveliness. Instead, say beautiful
things, say true things, speak wisely. Love everyone,
remembering; no such thing as other. There is only
the part of you that can react or respond. There are
the causes of ignorance or the conditions of awareness.
It doesn’t matter just how you arrive at this insight;
a poem, a prayer, some difficult loss. All that matters
is that you awaken, that you become someone who
speaks the language of wholeness.
– Moudi Sbeity
True education doesn’t bend children to our mold; it nurtures their wildness and lets them bloom.
– Sofo Archon
With its cliques and caucuses
The world grew
Stunned and stupid.
Don’t belong to any side,
Adore the One,
Joining the family
Of the kind and wise.
– Andrew Harvey, Engoldenment: A Year with Kabir
The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.
– Nora Ephron
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have to put something down in words.
– Javier Marías
Rivers don’t drink their own water;
Trees don’t eat their own fruit.
The Sun doesn’t shine for itself,
and Flowers don’t spread their
fragrance for themselves.
Living for others is a law of
nature.
Life is good when you are happy,
but life is even better when
others are happy because of you.
– Dalai Lama
He who has freed him-
self of the disease of
“tomorrow” has a
chance to attain what
he came here for.
– George Gurdjieff
Belonging is our intrinsic state when we are woven together as a village of differences in harmony. We can take the village as a metaphor for the internal life, with its wild cast of characters, as well as literally referring to the community of living things on earth. A sickness felt by even one organism in the ecosystem is felt, at some level, by all. The well-being of all, even those who aren’t immediately visible to us, is necessary to our collective prosperity.
– Toko-pa Turner
At times, we are asked to bear witness to a shattering. To the death of an old dream – me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out.
In mourning what has fallen away, a previously hidden threshold begins to appear.
Grief is not something we “make it through” and emerge from unchanged. We don’t finish it, but stand in awe as it takes us apart and pieces us back together.
It is a faithful companion of the unknown, moving not by way of the straight line, but by circle and spiral.
It holds us through the darkness as well as the light, until another life begins to gather itself.
– Matt Licata
Grief is
the midwife
of new life.
– Matt Licata
One of the First Psychedelic Rock Songs Ever Recorded Was Actually a Romantic Transcontinental Message to an Old Flame
There are many ways to get the attention of an old flame in the hopes of rekindling a spark, but Donovan might’ve taken the cake for most creative and culturally significant in the summer of 1966. On July 1, the Scottish singer-songwriter released what would become one of the first notable psychedelic rock records, “Sunshine Superman”.
But Donovan didn’t have genre pioneering on the brain when he wrote it. He had someone on his mind.
In the mid-1960s, Donovan met a woman named Linda Lawrence while on the set of Ready Set Go! The pair struck up a relationship, but it was short-lived. Lawrence had recently gotten out of a relationship with The Rolling Stones’ multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones. She had a baby to look after. The two parted ways. Donovan never stopped thinking about her.
“I wrote ‘Sunshine Superman’ knowing she’d hear the lyrics and realize I still loved her,” Donovan explained in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. “I sang, ‘It’ll take time, I know it / but in a while / You’re gonna be mine, I know it / We’ll do it in style.'” Donovan sent out his musical message in a bottle, so to speak. But this was the 1960s, and Lawrence had moved from the United Kingdom to the United States. The musician would have to wait quite a while before knowing if she heard the song and realized he was singing about her.
It took four years in total. In the late 1960s, Donovan bumped into Lawrence again after she returned to the U.K. with her American friend, Lorey. Somehow, Lorey put two and two together and realized that Donovan, the musician from whom she was renting a cottage during her visit, was Lawrence’s old flame.
“To this day, I don’t know if Lorey was setting us up,” Donovan said. “But she told Linda, ‘I’m renting a cottage. Want to see it?’ I met them when they came round, and Lorey said, ‘Oh, do you two know each other?’ We were married a few weeks later and have been together ever since.”
Speaking to Jeff Tamarkin in 2016, Donovan recalled a full-circle moment with Linda Lawrence, his “Sunshine Supergirl.” The married couple was riding in the car together when Donovan noticed a song on the radio that sounded a lot like “Sunshine Superman”. “I said, ‘Hey, listen to that. It’s another band that was influenced by what we did,'” he said. “And she said, ‘Don’t be stupid, Don. That is you!’ It was ‘Sunshine Superman’. I was listening to it at such a low level that all I could hear was the essence of the track.”
From hoping Lawrence would notice his song on the radio from across the pond to her being the one to remind Donovan that it was, in fact, him singing on the radio, this psychedelic love story is certainly among the sweetest in 1960s rock ‘n’ roll lore.
– American Songwriter News
People are not
beautiful for how
they look or speak.
They’re beautiful for
how they love,
care, and treat
others.
– Dalai Lama
You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human
beings by the number of words they exchange.
– Milan Kundera
The Soul should always stand ajar
That if the Heaven inquire
He will not be obliged to wait
Or shy of troubling Her
Depart, before the Host have slid
The Bolt unto the Door
To search for the accomplished Guest,
Her Visitor, no more
– Emily Dickinson
We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
– Barbara Max Hubbard
Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.
– Pythagoras
If God should have no more mercy on us than we have charity to one another, what would become of us?
– Thomas Fuller
Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before, but it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.
– CG Jung
You say ‘amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘Amateur’ comes from the Latin word ‘amare’ which means to love. To do things for the love of it.
– Mozart in the Jungle
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
– Immanuel Kant
In America, calling someone a “communist” is the political equivalent of shouting “witch!” in the 1600s. Different century, same panic button.
– James Richie
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
– Søren Kierkegaard
Anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever.
– George Cukor
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
– Oscar Wilde
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
– Dag Hammarskjold
To an under-appreciated extent, many of the pioneers of psychedelic therapy in the 1950s were women …. Female scientists like Luisa de Toledo in Argentina and Betty Eisner in California, working behind the scenes as they struggled against ever-present misogyny, have not made their way into the mainstream history of psychedelics.
– Benjamin Breen
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech… Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of everyman….
– Benjamin Franklin
The Matrix is not eternal. It was never meant to be permanent. It is a temporary construct, a highly advanced soul-training system created by higher intelligences to accelerate evolution through the most extreme form of forgetting and separation possible. From the higher perspective, this realm is a cosmic university for advanced souls who volunteered to experience the deepest contrast so they could emerge with unparalleled wisdom and creative power.
– @homi3kh
Walk gently, love fiercely, and find your abundance in the stillness.
– James Phillips
Any understanding of the world or even of Buddhist practice is a construct of the mind. Paradoxically, for practitioners, Buddhist teachings are constructs of mind that point beyond themselves.
– Gil Fronsdal
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
– George Santayana
I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.
– Rosalía de Castro
Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. When anger erupts, it is a signal that something is wrong. Something isn’t working right….What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside.
– Eugene Peterson
Only two levers move people: fear and personal interest.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. So breathe in and be aware of your body. Look deeply into it and realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the earth.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The older I get, the more I believe happiness lives in the ordinary. Pets. Plants. A quiet morning coffee. Blue sky. Cotton clouds. Birds singing. The gentle breeze through the trees. A clean, cozy house. Good food. Good hearted simple people. So much of life’s beauty is quiet, gentle, and already here. And somehow, one of the sweetest feelings is knowing I get to wake up and meet it all again tomorrow.
– Karun Pal
What is going on in the lower reaches of society is probably very much more potent and effective than what happens in intellectual circles.
– Ekkehard Hieronimus
The sage is like the space; he is untouched by everything.
– Ashtavakra
At last we create some Space between this and that, which liberates us tremendously.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.
– Ramana Maharshi
Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words.
Take the backward step and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself will drop
off and your original face will appear.
If you want to attain just this,
immediately practice just this.
– Eihei Dogen
In many so-called primitive cultures it is a requirement of tribal initiation to spend a lengthy period alone in the forests or mountains, a period of coming to terms with the solitude and non-humanity of nature so as to discover who, or what, one really is—a discovery hardly possible while the community is telling you what you are, or ought to be. He may discover, for instance, that loneliness is the masked fear of an unknown which is himself, and that the alien-looking aspect of nature is a projection upon the forests of his fear of stepping outside habitual and conditioned patterns of feeling. There is much evidence to show that for anyone who passes through the barrier of loneliness, the sense of individual isolation bursts, almost by dint of its own intensity, into the “all-feeling” of identity with the universe. One may pooh-pooh this as “nature mysticism” or “pantheism,” but it should be obvious that a feeling of this kind corresponds better with a universe of mutually independent processes and relations than with a universe of distinct, block-like entities.
– Alan Watts
Christianity never succeeded in America. Most Americans think of themselves as Christians. But the only religion in America that ever flourished was America… Our religion is a kind of Orphic post-Christian mystery religion based on wealth, power and one’s personal relationship with a kind of gnostic Jesus.
– David Bentley Hart
Almost all our so-called ‘modern’ is not yet new. It is merely novel by imitation or indirection; or pretense by imported picture.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.
– Clay Shirky
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.
– Meister Eckhart
Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.
– Michael A. Singer
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
– Jonathan Swift
No poem is just its autobiographical content. No poem is just its embroidery of language. As a reader, I favor poems that have multiple textures, moving freely from plain-speech, to silken […] But all poetic language must be soaked in the oil of human feeling.
– Henri Cole
Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself.
– Michael A. Singer
Writing and reading are gentle actions, that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world.
– George Saunders
The purpose of spiritual practice is to become free, not to forge golden chains of limitation.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Invisible Fish
by Joy Harjo
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store.
It’s almost as if poets
are offering a religion
of noticing things.
– Ada Limón
It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.
The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.
– Cleanth Brooks
Your insecurity has something joyful, carefree and confident about it. One worries about you, but wouldn’t want you any other way.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
– William Shakespeare
I have been singularly fortunate in having such generous and perceptive friends to buck and bolster me up!
– J.R.R. Tolkien
There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th’ eternal embers.
We are not shut from all the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysoprase.
– Ezra Pound
That is one of the problems with reading great writing: you can lose sight of the fact that you really don’t like it.
– Kay Ryan
Once more, once more
I am
Your star.
Woe to the sailor with level
And compass
Whose angle is false.
He will wreck on rocks
And hidden shoals.
Woe to you without love
Or compassion
Who angled me false.
You will wreck on rocks
And the rocks will laugh
at you the way you did
at me.
– Paul Schmidt
I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
a rubble of tendons,
knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
how can I love you?
– Margaret Atwood
Humility leads to compassion. Compassion for the mineral kingdom, for the animal kingdom, for the vegetable kingdom, for the human kingdom and for everything else. Everything is sacred. Have reverence for all of life.
– Robert Adams
A human being is a creative force thirsting for conscious realization. Our creativity isn’t as a mere hobby, a sideline, something that we should just indulge in on our days off. The creative spirit is an essential part of our being, the life-giving oxygen for our soul.
– Paul Levy
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
She who did not want—To renounce her peace; the happiness of finally having become the desert, the contentment of a dune in the sun; the triumph of renunciation; did not want to renounce renouncing; at the moment in which she had just made solitude her fiancée; to renounce the endless, barely rippled, bright, dry happiness of not being unhappy. All she did not want to do, with good reason, with every reason and no madness at all, everything she had learned from having soared and having crashed, from being broken and getting back up and soaring
again.
– The Book of Promethea, Hélène Cixous, (tr. Betsy Wing)
By themselves neither pleasure nor pain enlighten, only understanding does. Once you have grasped the truth that the world is full of suffering, that to be born is a calamity, you will find the urge and the energy to go beyond it.
– Nisargadatta
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
– Bertolt Brecht
…and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.
– Hebrews 12:13
O deodar tree
I haven’t learned how to live
Both of us far from the mountains
I have not adjusted, not adapted
No one must blame you
– Philip Whalen
Exaggerate the green blood in grass;
the music of leaves scraping space;
Multiply the stillness by one sound;
by one syllable of your name…
And all that is little is soon giant,
all that is rare grows in common beauty
– Kenneth Patchen
A useful basket definition of the shadow is: that which I do not wish to be, that within myself with which I least desire to associate, that which I find frightening, anarchic and threatening to my self-image.
– James Hollis
There is no hope of joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left with me an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
– Ray Bradbury
Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
– Antonin Artaud, (tr. Eshleman & Bador)
The world will not be saved by more thinking. It will be saved by a shift in consciousness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
– Bernard DeVoto
a dragonfly
crosses the creek
without a sound
– Ogawa
Food was never intended to be used as fun. Food was intended to be used as nourishment. When you use food as fun, your body has no fun at all. It works harder, and it ultimately can’t fight off the effects of mistreatment.
– Neale Donald Walsch
I love the men that never ventured
to love me the most. I love the men who
saw me as myself before I did.
– Kaylen Rae Candrilli
Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.
– Jenny Han
Social life is based on consciousness, not science. If there’s no honesty, no respect for truth, no respect for responsibilities, no love of one’s neighbor—in a word, if there’s no virtue—everything is in danger, everything crumbles.
– Leo Tolstoy
Nature knows more than a hundred doctors.
– Gurdjieff
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The soul doesn’t live at home in the body but like a wanderer on a journey to a distant refuge.
– Leo Tolstoy
July is hot afternoons and sultry nights and mornings when its joy just to be alive. July is a picnic and a red canoe and a sunburned neck and a softball game and ice tinkling in a tall glass. July is a blind date with summer.
– Hal Borland
one candle
outlasting
a conversation
– Ogawa
I must change my life so
that I can live it,
not wait for it.
– Susan Sontag
Solitude is the therapy others often mistake for loneliness.
– Noor Shirazie
As long as we delude ourselves by what we imagine ourselves to be, to know, to have, to do, we are in a sad plight indeed. Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.
– Frank O’Hara
Spirituality is not religion. It is a path for us to generate happiness, understanding, and love, so we can live deeply each moment of our life.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Having a spiritual dimension in our lives does not mean escaping life or dwelling in a place of bliss outside this world but discovering ways to handle life’s difficulties and generate peace, joy, and happiness right where we are, on this beautiful planet.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Defiance
There needs some rushing force
for any defiant push-back;
like the way a planted flag
can only properly live
and breath
if aroused by a challenging wind.
– Julian Cason
They’re sending you all that negative energy. Not realizing that all they can do to an alchemist like you is fire you up.
– Nika Solé
BAD ASS
A novel can’t be as strong,
a play as obscene,
sculpture as dangerous
as me.
– Joseph Ceravolo
We spend so much time trying to look beautiful on the outside, yet the people who leave the deepest impact on us are often the ones with kind hearts, pure intentions, and a peaceful presence.
– Brahma Kumaris
I paused instead of searching for the way.
I found nothing and nothing
never felt so good.
I return sometimes. Sometimes I like it.
I like the smells, the psalms, the bells for prayer
at midday and at six,
the feeling of the beads between my fingers,
the touch of skin to lips when someone
puts a story in my mouth.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
cool breeze
a pine shadow
crosses the sand
– Basho
But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak-to be company.
– Mary Oliver
Literature enlarges the mind and opens the heart, and is a precious gift of culture, both a doorway to understanding and the occasion of instructive aesthetic pleasure. In the present critical climate, I believe that we need to be reminded of that.
– James W. Tuttleton
tree hollow
the ins and outs
of another world
– Simon Hanson
I believe that sometimes
you have to look reality
in the eye and deny it
– Garrison Keillor
Let your teacher be Love Itself.
– Rumi
We wished to extinct our grief, but grief was the one thing in endless supply.
– Elizabeth Robinson
Our inner lives are every bit as astonishing, baffling, and mysterious as the infinite vastness of the cosmos. For we are each individual expressions of conscious being, and we contain the vastness of the cosmos within us, as much as we are contained within it.
– Adyashanti
summer evening
your favorite song
finds you first
– Aoki
People, people, people —
an ocean of people, but I
can’t find even a drop of
humanity.
– Sadia Hakim
Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned.
– Roberto Calasso
summer rain
the street forgets
its hardness
– Akari
“O Conversation, the staff of life, shall I get any at Oxford?” wrote the always wise and prescient T.S. Eliot to his old pal Conrad Aiken.
– Pico Iyer
I’ve been able to work for so long because I think: next time, I’ll make something good.
– Akira Kurosawa
NIGHT DAMPNESS
I am sick and tired of the river, the stars
that strew the sky, this heavy funereal silence.
To while away the time, I talk to my coachman, who
looks like an old man…. He tells me that this dark, forbidding river
abounds in sterlet, white salmon, eel-pout, pike, but there is no one
to catch the fish and no tackle to catch it with.
– Anton Chekhov, Across Siberia
before dawn
the stars grow
generous
– Aoi
You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature. You must face the opposite, what you are not, to find enlightenment.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.
– Novalis
Life and death are in the power of the tongue, as is success or failure and lack or abundance, for words and thoughts are a form of radioactivity.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
You’ll often find that the most spiritually grounded people have a wonderful sense of humor. They don’t just reflect deeply. They laugh deeply too and are often seen as jokers. They embody the playfulness and lightness that are just as much a part of reality as its depth.
– @VexKing
sunset picnic
the strawberries
steal the conversation
– Akari
When there are thoughts, watch the awareness, not thoughts. When there are no thoughts, watch the awareness. Thoughts or no thoughts, continue to observe awareness itself, not thoughts. Continue to relax in and be aware of your awareness. Remain there. Be there.
– Michael Langford
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
– Henry Wadsworth
To see the poor as ourselves we must want for the poor what we want for ourselves.
– bell hooks
We are very, very small, but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.
– Stephen Hawking
The universe does not behave according to our preconceived ideas. It continues to surprise us.
– Stephen Hawking
There are some sprouts that fail to flower, just as surely as there are some flowers that fail to bear fruit!
– Confucius
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
Life gets harder simply because there’s some higher force that sees what you’re capable of and what you’ve achieved. And then, it sends you a harder challenge.
– Bill Murray
We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African Savannah.
– Stanislas Dehaene
Sins are not all committed at once, nor all discovered at once; they grow by degrees and are discovered by degrees… but God has his times to discover and make them known to the sons of men.
– William Greenhill
For fantasy to have depth, it must have detail.
– Susan Sontag
The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
The prophetic task is to grieve what the empire tells you to celebrate.
– Walter Brueggemann
To be truly remarkable, a man must possess a “something” that is entirely his own and not borrowed from others.
– Lahiri Mahasaya
Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Writing is like a sport, it’s like athletics. If you don’t practice, you don’t get any better.
– Rick Riordan
When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom.
– Arthur C. Brooks
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
– Eric Hoffer
But today, of all days it is brought home to me: it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.
– Bilbo Baggins
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
– Marilyn vos Savant
Here is a suggestion for all of us who may feel lonely: Maybe we should seek a medicine for our loneliness not only among people, but in nature and amid things that also can have a personality.
– Thomas Moore
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
– James Baldwin
When I talk about solitude I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person. It is making space to be there.
– May Sarton
I learned long ago that you do not tell creative people how to solve the problem, but you share the desired outcome.
– Gene Columbus
Then there is the listening at the gates of the heart which has been closed for so long, and waiting for that mysterious inner voice to speak. When we hear it, we know it is the truth to which we must now surrender our lives.
– Beth Ferris in Finding What You Didn’t Lose by John Fox
I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.
– William Blake
A translated document hidden in an archive is not dissemination. It is a museum object. An idea becomes alive only when people can hear it, share it, teach it, question it, and use it.
– Daniel Che
And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends
would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then
their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope.
They would grow old. They would forget me.
– Sylvia Plath
Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking.
– Harper Lee
By not contemplating external pleasures, by keeping them outside, by fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, and by equalizing the breath and the breath flowing through the nose, such a sage, who has conquered the senses, mind, and intellect, becomes free from desire, fear, and anger, and is eternally free.
– Bhagavad Gita
Our movement does not give blind people beauty and power. We come to the movement with those qualities.
– Mark Riccobono
‘She wants to be everything.’ I wanted to be a poet.
– Sylvia Plath
We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
– Paul Valéry
That might be the most important thing to understand about humans. It’s the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions.
– Benjamin Sisko
Future generations deserve bees.
Future generations deserve butterflies.
Future generations deserve wolves.
Future generations deserve whales.
Future generations deserve biodiversity.
– @pejtjer
Every species that goes extinct is a page quietly torn from the greatest Biology textbook ever written.
– Scholastica Muogbo
Enjoyment comes from the non-discrimination of the soul.
– Swami Vivekananda
Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.
– Brian Tracy
Like people are always ready with arms and weapons before war , an individual should always be ready with their philosophy in the war of life.
– Marcus Aurelius
The real threat to America today, Trump’s hysteria notwithstanding, isn’t communism: it’s the new American form of fascism that’s centered in the Trump regime, the Republicans on the Supreme Court, ICE, and is pushed heavily across the rightwing media empires that neofascist billionaires have set up over the past 40 years.
– Thom Hartman
GUIDED MEDITATION
Sit in a way that allows you to be comfortable
and relaxed. Do not let this hot and humid morning
enter your mind. Empty your mind, even if you
were up until 3am trying to forget what
your doctor told you yesterday afternoon. Now
take three deep breaths allowing yourself
to savor the mysterious gift that you
are breathing. You are breathing here
during this one moment, the only moment
that the benevolence of the earth gives
during this moment. This is your moment
even though we do not yet know
what a moment is. I often wonder what
the moment is just prior to the moment.
But that is a thought. And this is a yoga
meditation, and we are to accept each thought
as simply something that passes through us
and goes on its merry, or often un-merry, way.
Take another breath counting to four on the inhale
while picturing a gnome strolling up your nostrils
lugging a bag of gentle breezes, then count to six
on the exhale as the gnome cascades ass over
essential oils on an avalanche of air. Feel
your whole body fully relaxed. Continue breathing.
Picture a candle in a cave. Do not ask why in the
whole wide world there is a candle in a cave. If
you do, see in the question a yogi smiling as he
searches for the matches. Continue breathing.
And now imagine a field of lotus flowers. Or
if you are from the midwest and unfamiliar
with lotus flowers you can always substitute corn.
Now picture rain on a roof. Listen to it. Listen
to the distant cough of thunder. Just listen. Don’t
think about what you left out to ruin the last time
it rained. Continue breathing, and as you do, allow
any image to appear on the multiplex of your mind.
Be sure not to fixate on any one image. If a lover
old or new comes at you with a flame thrower, just
sit, watch, let it all pass, be glad your ego’s been emulsified.
Stay relaxed. Continue breathing. Feel the comfort
of your whole body as you repeat the mantra, “I am
at peace. I am totally at peace. I am really, totally at peace.”
Now that you are at peace, feel your feet, palms, pelvic floor
fully at rest in the room. Come to Sukhasana. Bring your hands
to your heart, and join me for one long peaceful Om.
– Jack Ridl
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
– Roland Barthes
“As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space,” Milosz writes, “I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!” And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.
There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
– William James
Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language.
Speech in the sense of empirical language – that is, the opportune recollection of a pre-established sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is… the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary – speech which signifies, which finally renders ‘l’absente de tous’ present and frees the sense captive in the thing – is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun.
Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trauma
was not being
able to get
the hands
of the clock
off of me.
Healing
was learning
no one has ever
laid a fingerprint
on the part of me
that’s infinite.
– Andrea Gibson
In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one’s foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.
– Jean Cocteau
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
– Martha Nussbaum
This is the school, isn’t it? The magic place? The world. Here. And you don’t realize it until you look.
– Terry Pratchett
He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marveled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.
– Oscar Wilde
I know I look bizarre, totally artificial, but inside, I’m very real.
– Dolly Parton
There is no person without a world.
– Anne Carson
The Way Things Have Been Going Lately
I’ve been thinking of moving someplace
warm, buying a pick-up and keeping the radio
turned to the highest level. Everyone thinks that
now and again, right? I hope they do it. My friend,
Ms. Red did it. (She lives in New Orleans now
with two turtles and some boy I’ve never met.
She signs every letter on the outside with the date
and the temperature. The letter I got today
said, May 11th, 88 degrees in the shade.)
There’s a restaurant in my hometown called,
The Ranch House, serves Mexican food.
It’s right off the highway and if you sit in
the window you can read all the large billboards
welcoming people into town. The food’s
pretty awful and it’s dirty, but for some reason
I want to go there right now. I want to be welcomed.
Sometimes I think I am angrier than
most people, but when I think of this river
up in the Northwest that I once walked
and swam in for miles, I think I could be
so full of light that it would be hard
to hold me back from missing even where
I am right now, but how do you hold
a river in your head before it turns
straighter and black, unfolds into asphalt,
into some mean road rolled out before you.
– Ada Limón
Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.
– Jorie Graham
People think intimacy is sex. But intimacy is about Truth. When you realize that you can tell someone your Truth, when you can show yourself to him/her who you really are, and their response is, “You are safe with me”, that is intimacy.
– Christiane Singer
The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.
– Marshall McLuhan
The little things that you saw with a child’s eye and that will never go away. That’s what consciousness is all about.
– Derek Mahon
Instructions to an Actor
Now, boy, remember this is the great scene.
You’ll stand on a pedestal behind a curtain,
the curtain will be drawn, and then you don’t move
for eighty lines; don’t move, don’t speak, don’t breathe.
I’ll stun them all out there, I’ll scare them,
make them weep, but it depends on you.
I warn you eighty lines is a long time,
but you don’t breathe, you’re dead,
you’re a dead queen, a statue,
you’re dead as stone, new-carved,
new-painted and the paint not dry
– we’ll get some red to keep your lip shining –
and you’re a mature woman, you’ve got dignity,
some beauty still in middle age, and
you’re kind and true, but you’re dead,
your husband thinks you’re dead,
the audience thinks you’re dead,
and you don’t breathe, boy, I say you
don’t even blink for eighty lines,
if you blink you’re out!
Fix your eye on something and keep watching it.
Practice when you get home. It can be done.
And you move at last – music’s the cue.
When you hear a mysterious solemn jangle
of instruments, make yourself ready.
Five lines more, you can lift a hand.
It may tingle a bit, but lift it-
slow, slow –
O this is where I hit them
right between the eyes, I’ve got them now –
I’m making the dead walk –
you move a foot, slow, steady, down,
you guard your balance in case you’re stiff,
you move, you step down, down from the pedestal,
control your skirt with one hand, the other hand
you now hold out –
O this will melt their hearts if nothing does –
to your husband who wronged you long ago
and hesitates in amazement
to believe you are alive.
Finally he embraces you, and there’s nothing
I can give you to say, boy,
but you must show that you have forgiven him.
Forgiveness, that’s the thing. It’s like a second life.
I know you can do it. – Right then, shall we try?
– Edwin Morgan
The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning ‘juice’ or ‘essence’. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.
– Marina Warner
When we lose a loved one, we need to grieve that loss and yet consciously value what we have internalized from that person. The parent who suffers the empty nest syndrome, for example, suffers less the loss of the child than the implicit identity which went with being that child’s parent. The energy invested in that role is now available for a different direction. So, we honor best those we have lost by making their contribution to our lives conscious, living with that value deliberately, and incorporating that value in the on-going life enterprise. This is the proper conversion of inescapable loss into this evanescent life. Such conversion is not denial but transformation. Nothing which is internalized is ever lost. Even in loss, then, something soulful remains.
– James Hollis
Interaction with an egoist leads to our own corruption, because in defending ourselves, we risk falling into his errors.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai
i’m reliving it, neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. that’s not easy. it’s at once painful and poetic.
– simone de beauvoir
At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.
– William Arrowsmith
We are the bees of the invisible.
Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forbears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again “invisibly”.
We are the bees of the invisible. We collect the honey of the visible and store it up in the golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.)
– Rilke
Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey
The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.
– Paulo Coelho
A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affect a person’s mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called misbehavior or misconduct. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting not only your ability to learn but your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.
If you are an Aboriginal person living in Australia, this will almost certainly lead to incarceration and/or a decreased life span. The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. It involves representing real-life elements with metaphors, which transform tangible things into spirit, images in an abstract space. That is the action of the line at the top of the symbol. In that Dreaming space, the abstract entities can be manipulated and reorganized to find solutions to real-life problems. This is how the thought experiments in this book have been conducted. For a simple example of this Turnaround process, consider the way four apples and two hungry people can be translated into the abstract symbols of 4/2. The solution (=2) may then be found in the abstract space, transferred back to reality and applied to share the apples equally. If one person has more nutritional requirements than the other, then the abstract of 3:1 might be applied.
– Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
AI artwork looks the way Christian rock sounds.
– @emilypopcast
The world, I’ve come to think is like the surface of a frozen lake. We walk along, we slip, we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there is a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is an unimaginable depth.
– James Joyce
The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.
– Thom Hartmann
I do not study to know more, but to be less ignorant.
– Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
You can’t go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
– C. S. Lewis
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
– Ray Bradbury
Impossible to imagine dying anywhere else than in the silence of the desert. Of all things, not to pass away amid sound and fury. To recover the only freedom, which is that of space and emptiness.
– Jean Baudrillard
I’ve always been happiest when I can sit in the dark, when I can turn off my own life and watch a story unfold.
– Rebecca Makkai
The hermit said:
Because the world is mad,
The only way through the world is to learn
The arts and double the madness. Are you listening?
– Robert Bly
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
– Leo Tolstoy
To be a published author is not to be given a key to the ivory tower, though many people will have you believe that it is. You don’t have to choose the isolated writing life; you can choose togetherness. You can choose to share and participate and join.
– Brooke Warner
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a warm, tender heart is not at the core of our compassion, then our sense of responsibility can feel more like obligation. Our concern for others can turn into an unpleasant burden that weighs us down without benefiting anyone else. When our compassion doesn’t come from its most natural and effective source – tsewa – it becomes artificial and overly conceptual. Even though we are thinking about the well-being of others, there is a strong sense of self: this is what I want, what I think is good and right for the situation. So much attachment to our own view leaves us little room to see things as they really are and to act in ways that are truly beneficial. Instead, we can become pessimistic, heavy-handed, and dreary.
Among the greatest examples of compassion in my life are His Holiness the Dalai Lama and my principal teachers: His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Trulshik Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. When I look at any of these people, I don’t see any dreariness. The Dalai Lama has lost his country and spent most of his life in exile. He has witnessed tremendous suffering and feels personally responsible for the welfare of many beings – not just Tibetans, but even those who might be considered his enemies. Yet he continually exudes cheer and warmth, which is felt palpably by all who come in contact with him. This is because his heart is always open, day and night, expressing and receiving tsewa.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
in a world
of only thistles
no flower could be
more beautiful
– Alec Finlay
WORDS
What is one to make of a life given
to putting things into words,
saying them, writing them down?
Is there a world beyond words?
There is. But don’t start, don’t
go on about the tree unqualified,
standing in light that shines
to time’s end beyond its summoning
name. Don’t praise the speechless
starlight, the unspeakable dawn.
Just stop.
Well, we can stop
for a while, if we try hard enough,
if we are lucky. We can sit still,
keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,
the river, the stone call themselves
by whatever they call themselves, their own
sounds, their own silence, and thus
may know for a moment the nearness
of the world, its vastness,
its vast variousness, far and near,
which only silence knows. And then
we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness.
– Wendell Berry
Any Common Desolation
by Ellen Bass
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
Time’s Thought
by Fanny Howe
The ordeal of dying must be memory, so much seeing and losing forms.
Friends whacking at invisible ankles and you.
The action is done in a dream. Who did what?
The closed book, the feet
asleep.
Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks.
Are you collecting material for dreams, she asked the audience.
None of them remembered collecting or dreaming.
Nothing specific, that is.
For a book, no.
They lay down that night not looking for a real thing but for a way back.
A dream broke time apart.
You’re allowed to fear the coming hallucinations, she added.
You met me at the subway
where tracks led east to
North Station and on
up to Cape Ann.
We were almost romantic
Not knotted but erect
side by side passively waiting
for an apocalyptic collision to rupture
the grave tension between wholly conscious
ontological thinking
and the steel pebbling motion of tracks
sparked into action by a fiery touch.
We smiled our way forward perfectly even.
To be described as a note that separates from a song and blows away.
When you are down to nothing more to call onOR you can say I
walked Manhattan from sundown to dawn.
So I have traveled the world.
I walked by foot all over dungeons to see a film starring friends—Americans.
The ceiling collapsed from heavy rain and artificial colors condensed
along the sidewalk.
One puddle looked just like the world-marble.
Time had thinned for gravity and a speeding apple
Since time was lightweight and invisible.
Manifest, unbelievable.
A faraway land
And a hotel I never visited
In a ghost-book half-erased
You could tell I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature (all of it)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the poor dirt to eat.
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
– Robert A. Heinlein
I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything – you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Gratitude rewires your brain. Laughter is anti inflammatory. Crying helps regulate your nervous system. Releasing anger can free the body from tension it was never meant to carry.
Feeling isn’t weakness. It’s how you heal.
– Anthony Goldsmith
I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things-and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others- Which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.
– Clarice Lispector
There’s a huge amount of suffering that is generated not by the actual challenges of life but by the fictitious problems that the mind creates.
– Eckhart Tolle
Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have to be “silence experts.” Through their training and with their third ear, they try to listen to the symphony of what is not being said.
– Henry Abramovitch
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.
– May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
It’s harder than it used to be to talk to people.
– Ralph Adamo
I’ve been trying to go home
my whole life.
– Chelsea Dingman
summer heat–
today, all day
playful clouds
– Kobayashi Issa
dragonflies writing
quick blue letters
to the pond
– Ogawa
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.
– William James
There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses – only results.
– Ken Blanchard
What I’m going through
at this very moment
can never be changed.
It cannot be arrested.
It feels like the sun in your chest.
– Franz Wright
The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of our eyes, with the skin of our hands.
– Hélène Cixous
The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. But finally, you must realize you are this Love. The source of all Love is within you.
– Gangaji
morning fog
confidence arrives
one step at a time
– Akari
It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now.
– Hugh Laurie
I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.
– Khalil Gibran
Come out into the broad light of day, come out from the little narrow prisons, for you are the whole world.
– Osho
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy
Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.
– Adolph Monod
Good must triumph over evil. It usually does in life and in any case it’s bad for young people to believe it doesn’t.
– Barbara Cartland
Contentment is the greatest wealth; without it, one remains a beggar.
– Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
Pride is spiritual cancer; it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense.
– C. S. Lewis
No change, however, can take your neighbor from you, for it is not your neighbor who holds you fast – it is your love which holds your neighbor fast.
– Kierkegaard
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
– Lee Iacocca
In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis.
– Paul Krugman
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions.
– Virginia Woolf
If we do not understand the paradoxes of our age, we will continue to be confused by the outcomes.
– Victor David Hanson
In each of us there is a spark that can reverse the trends of violence and depression spiraling within us and in the world around us. By setting in motion the spiral of gratefulness we begin the journey toward peace and joy.
– Br. David Steindl-Rast
Remember: if you have an irrational fear, every time you avoid it, you are reinforcing the fear. So… make a plan to face it! Fears are conquerable!
– Dr. Henry Cloud
I came to be a man of letters in a world that prefers numbers.
– Vladimir Nabokov
The Omnipresent God of the universe cannot be seen until He is reflected by these giant lamps of the earth, the prophets, the man-gods, the incarnations, the embodiments of God.
– Vivekananda
You can see only a little way ahead, but that is enough to carry you all the way.
– C.S. Lewis
Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.
– Katherine Henson
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
– Oscar Wilde
A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.
– Maya Angelou
The world sometimes want to shake us with its urgency but I want you to know that you can be steady, wise, sober, and sure-footed because you are better prepared when you can see the truth and importance of that situation.
– Minjin Lee
I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…
– Albert Einstein
There’s a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.
– Roger Ebert
Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.
– William Feather
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you’ve even survived,
But what torments of grief you’ve endured,
From evils which never arrived?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
– Walter Mosley
That behavior went all the way…all the way back to the prototype.
– Avalokiteśvara
It is not Communism. It’s accountability. Politicians should be accountable to their voters. Billionaires should be accountable to the workers they exploit. A world without accountability is nothing more than chaos and violence.
– Ehren Fournier
Every choice you make today is either building your future or stealing from it.
– Naresh Choudhary
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Everyone’s wisdom path is different. You’ve got to find your own.
– Sundee T. Frazier
And while the ache and tragedy of the world persists, there are still the daffodils, and the cherry blossoms, and the plums that will open soon.
– Emory Hall
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me.
– Goethe
He had read and thought a good deal, and, owing to a somewhat unhappy marriage, had evolved a complete philosophy of life.
– E.M. Forster
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
– Marcel Proust
Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.
– Dorothea Brande
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
– Clifton Fadiman
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone-but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
– Bette Davis
The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ‘what is already known’. Those great books don’t need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.
– Susan Sontag
The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth holding on to.
– Jack Kornfield
If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
The friendship institution is as old as the marriage institution. In an age of singlehood, however, the friendship institution will come to the fore to fill the void that marriage can no longer fill. For many, meaningful friendships will become a life goal just as important, if not more so, than getting married.
– Elyakim Kislev
If you want to know your purpose, pay attention to what stays with you – the ideas you can’t forget, the things you return to even when they’re difficult, the work that refuses to let you go. That’s your soul speaking.
– Joseph Campbell
Our own country is more provincial with every passing day—more provincial and more self-important, as though it had shut its eyes.
– Borges
Self condemnation is not humility.
It’s another form of deception.
– Bill Johnson
No Society that forgets the art of questioning can expect to find answers to the problems that afflict it.
– Zygmunt Bauman
Authenticity is not about saying whatever pops into your head. It’s about sharing what reflects who you want to be.
Healthy self-expression doesn’t mean no filter. It involves weighing whether your current thoughts and emotions are aligned with your lasting values.
– Adam Grant
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
– William of Bakersfield, Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
There is no new dawn without a dark night beforehand.
– Clarice Lispector
So you know that when you look at something and you applaud it or say ‘Yes!’ to it, that you included in your vibration?
But in the same way when you look at something that you would vote vehemently against, you shout ‘NO!’ at it, you’re still are including it in your vibration?
There’s no such thing as ‘No’ in a vibrational universe because attention to anything is an activation of it within you, which is an invitation of it.
– Abraham-Hicks
I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
– Oliver Sacks
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
– Sherwood Anderson
The devotion to personal contentment is the depression machine, it generates the depression. It makes the depression inevitable which of course obliges you to work harder to be happy and there we are. But how does it do that? Because it whispers to you that happiness should be the discernible consequence of you winning, of you trying hard, of your best intent being in the forefront of all your design. And a lot of people in the world, ancestrally, knew long ago that being content or that sense of well-being, that’s a consequence of your willingness to help the world live. That your happiness is actually a corollary—let me change happiness—that your health is a corollary of the health of everything around you.
– Stephen Jenkinson
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
– Thomas Merton
Awareness is all about restoring your freedom to choose what you want instead of what your past imposes on you.
– Deepak Chopra
Metaphor catalyzes movement by overriding old and familiar patterns of thought with fresh ways of seeing. This is why art and poetry are so important to culture.
It is the job of the artist to catalyze consciousness on behalf of the collective. They must be courageous enough to enter the imaginal in order to find living metaphors to bring back to this world and in doing so, redeem culture. It is an act of overcoming.
As the poet Louise Glück says, art removes “the misery of inertia.”
A metaphor unrecognized will do nothing to shape us, and so in turn we can do nothing differently to shape our world. What’s needed is a true encounter in the imagination to shift one’s gestalt.
– Toko-pa Turner
The mouth opens and fills the air with its vibrant shape
Until the air and the mouth become one shape
And the first word
your own word
Spoken from that fire
Surprises burns
Grieves you now because you made that pact
With the dark presence in your life
He said, “If you only stop singing
I’ll make you safe”
And he repeated the line,
“I’ll make you safe”.
Knowing you would hear it as the comforting sound
Of a door closed on the fear at last
But his darkness slipped under your tongue and became the dim cave
Where you sheltered and grew in that small place
Too frightened to remember the songs of the world
Its impossible notes
And the sweet joy that flew out the door
Of your wild mouth as you spoke
– David Whyte
Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.
– Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche
MIND
How many of you believe you can
quiet the mind through effort?
You can’t do that.
It’s not the effort that makes you quiet your mind.
It’s the intelligent understanding
that you have no mind to begin with.
Then you just keep still and
everything takes care of itself.
– Robert Adams
Love causes magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.
– Novalis
If you feel you ought to go, if I came to you at a moment when nothing could make you happy, if it’s necessary for you to leave me now so that you may some day come back to me at peace, then it is I who ask you to go…
– Alain-Fournier
Think what it would mean if you could love everybody — not because all persons in the world are so attractive and lovable that they awaken your love, but because an ever-present consciousness of Love exists within yourself and, like the sun, rays out in all directions on the “just and the unjust” alike… Those who have attained Love-Consciousness carry Love and Joy around with them wherever they go, for it is withIN themselves instead of withOUT. Enter where they may, they find an atmosphere of Love, because it is they who bring that atmosphere… Love beautified everything.
– Cyril Scott, The Initiate In The New World
During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can’t give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can’t always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.
– Nicole Krauss
I’m coming back to you, the real world, crowded, dark, and full of fate—
– Wisława Szymborska
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
– Ralph Ellison
The election of the first anti-American president was caused neither by electoral whim nor by the good fortune of a charismatic madman. His rise was made possible by a coterie of criminals who do not want to be punished but delight in being caught. Flaunting their criminal impunity is part of the thrill. Their belief that they would never be held accountable is logical since they had never faced serious consequences despite spending decades committing illegal acts. In fact, they had reaped ample rewards. Now, finally, they had the greatest reward of all: the power to rewrite law itself.
– Sarah Kendzior
You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment, because at least that means you had expectations.
– Sarah Kendzior
But there is a difference between expecting an American autocracy and accepting it, and I refuse to accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, and of our obligation to fight for a better future for the next generation.
– Sarah Kendzior
I don’t want my children to chase American illusions marketed as American dreams, but I want them to understand why things went wrong, to appreciate everyday miracles and not think them small, to have reverence for the good that endures and work to protect it, a republic if you can keep it, a family that would remain American whether or not America remains. We would love America out of defiance, and defy America out of love.
– Sarah Kendzior
The Great Work
There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.
– David Fideler
People with a wealth of authenticity and talents don’t usually feel comfortable with curating & manipulating images for public consumption. In fact, it makes them feel uncomfortable because they live inside of a real offering, one that speaks for itself. But those who have risen to public notoriety on the wings of transactionality and artifice (fake names, staged rhetoric, nepotism) live and die by the sword of presentation. This makes the show they put on difficult to interpret. It appears to be one thing, when it could have a very different intention. Those who speak from their souls never have to worry about this, but those who don’t, do. Because all they have is theatrics and a bottomless quest for validation. When left alone, away from the public eye, they live tormented lives. The best thing we could do for all of them is to ignore them. A little time alone with their unhealed longing is their only hope.
– Jeff Brown
WONDER WOMAN
Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.
– Ada Limón
What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction.
– Nicholas Carr
Some Advice
Travel light, always leaving room
in your suitcase for a few surprises.
Learn the names of things, and feel
more at home wherever you are.
Say: ground squirrel, goldenrod,
anemone. A field, a forest, or body
of water: these are all communities
of which you too are an integral part.
Don’t trust anyone who’d ruin a meadow
of bluebells just to add a few more
coins to their coffers, and don’t ever
become one of those people.
– James Crews
All Your Apple Seeds
Bright red apple in your hand
Looks like you’re holding my heart
You take one bite and throw it in the bin
Before picking another from the cart
You say one’s too sweet and one’s too soft
Too crisp too dry too tart
Next you’re rejecting apples with caramel coating
I remember the time you said I was too doting
Soon I’ll be tossed out
Like all your apple seeds
Love trees cut down before growth could start
– Kaylee Baucom
It never stops being INSANE to me that people who buy in to the idea that immigrants are taking their jobs also worship the billionaires like Elon developing AI that is literally and measurably in real time taking their jobs. Some people have been so easy to con. And most of them are men, embarrassingly
– Matt Haig
Canada Lily
A hidden gate swings open
in the humid air when I see
a rare Canada lily blooming
in the understory of our woods—
because we protected it,
wrapped a wall of wire mesh
around the thick-stemmed plant
to keep the deer from feasting on it.
Four orange blossoms still stippled
with dew now hang like bells
peeled back from their clappers,
announcing the joy of their own
slow unfolding. And isn’t this
the reward for any form of love?
You make a safe place for someone
or something to flower,
and in that quiet keeping,
in that selfless tending,
some part of you ripens, too.
– James Crews
There are forms of awakening
that bring extraordinary clarity.
But clarity is not always
intimacy.
Sometimes consciousness
becomes bright
before it has become warm.
The soul is still waiting for us
in the moonlight.
– Matt Licata
Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury.
It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.
– Julia Cameron
I liked the idea that
a poem was small enough
that it could get inside of
you and stay.
– Tracy K. Smith
distant galaxy
all wound up over nothing
the same everywhere
– clark strand
The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving nothing in the way of trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life…
– Jorie Graham
I’m coming back to you, the real world, crowded, dark, and full of fate—
– Wisława Szymborska
It is not the body that is important but the atmosphere around it. The atmosphere becomes permeated with this finer vibration, in the stillness. And another quality is there.
An axis begins to appear, of pure attention. There is a sensitivity.
This atmosphere, filled with energy. The body, like an envelope.
Respect this atmosphere, this energy contained in the body. And then, even subtler energies can come into you—the Light can come into you.
All my thoughts, feelings, ideas are nothing compared to this precious treasure, this quality of energy that is not mine but what I am.
More and more, with attending to presence, allowing higher forces to enter, staying collected, returning, we can live in a new way.
You can serve this energy. And the energy can heal. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. Help each other through living in this pure Attention.
– Michel de Salzmann
A day will come in which zealous research over long periods of time will bring to light things that still now lie hidden. The life of a single man , even if he devotes it entirely to the heavens, is insufficient to fathom so broad a field. Knowledge will thus unfold only over the course of generations .But there will come a time when our descendants will marvel that we did not know the things that seem so simple to them. Many discoveries are reserved for future centuries, however, when we are long forgotten. Our universe would be deplorably insignificant had it not offered every generation new problems. Nature does not surrender her secrets once and for all.
– Seneca
Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit — or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.
In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, in which confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life. Then we can serve it and let its strength flow through us.
Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. That is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow.
– Joanna Macy
Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn’t matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.
– Henry Miller
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.
– Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history is in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
– Kurt Vonnegut
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions.
– Ai Weiwei
…all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past un-recallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…
– László Krasznahorkai
What is required to come to an inner sensation, an inner feeling of reality? We need to know the way, the process, accepting that as we are today we have no means to open to reality amid the activity of life. I must know the road I am traveling—the way up and the way down. I learn first to withdraw from activity in order to find this Presence, something real in me. Afterward, I will again go toward manifestation.
– Jeanne de Salzmann
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
Carl Jung once wrote: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
You have arrived at the afternoon.
Don’t set sail!
Tomorrow the wind will have dropped;
And then you can go,
And I won’t trouble about you.
– Nicole Krauss
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
– Ray Bradbury
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
– Ray Bradbury
What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall
held up by the burning straps of
mortal shortfall?
– Anne Carson
A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.
– Anne Carson
…the world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle.
– Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
What does it mean to be “spiritual?” It means putting your feet on the ground. It means finding stillness, not only when you sit, but when you stand, and walk, and whirl. It means finding silence, not only between your thoughts, but in your words, in your laughter, in your tears. It means that you do not call yourself a “teacher.” Yet you teach with your Being.
– John Butler
Perhaps God made me a painter for people who are not yet born.
– Vincent van Gogh
No escape from paradox: Wisdom manifests itself, and is yet hidden. The more it hides, the more it is manifest; and the more it is manifest, the more it is hidden. For God is known when apprehended as unknown, and is heard when we realize that we do not know the sounds of God’s voice. The words uttered are words of full silence, and they are bait to draw us into silence. The truths manifested are full of hiddenness, and their function is to hide us, with themselves, in God from whom they proceed. If we hide the precepts of wisdom in our heart – precepts of humility, meekness, charity, renunciation, faith, prayer – they themselves will hide us in God. For the values which they give to us, are completely hidden from our eyes. They bring us to the source of a life that is unknown to the natural wisdom of the world, and yet from this source of nature itself proceeds, is nourished, and is sustained.
– Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration
Lord, give me victory,
help me defeat my enemies,
the skin on my body, the verge,
the hours, the years.
– Nichita Stanescu
It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground.
– David Whyte
They Speak
by Dorothy Walters
They speak of enlightenment.
Can darkness
dispel Darkness?
light illumine Light?
O, My Invisible,
you and I know the secret way
If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties–or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
– Julian Barnes
“First, my child,” said Old Turtle, “remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their one truth, forget that it is a part of all the small and lovely truths of life.”
– Douglas Wood
Zen Master Dogen has pointed out that anxiety, when accepted, is the driving force to enlightenment in that it lays bare the human dilemma at the same time that it ignites our desire to break out of it.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau
Your brain is not designed to make you happy. That’s your job.
– Anthony Robbins
We have drunk wine and discussed literature.
Our hearts have beat together
With the same emotions.
– Ch’iu Chin
Many people are seeking deeper meaning in their life and looking for what they value most. By relying on body awareness, an avenue to inner knowledge of the emotions and the spirit is created. This helps people find their true direction and purpose in life.
– Marion Rosen
A city built on the most correct architectural plan may be shaken suddenly by the uncontrollable force of nature. Humanity is living in such a spiritual city, subject to these sudden disturbances for which neither architects nor mathematicians have made allowance. In one place lies a great wall crumbled to pieces like a card house, in another are the ruins of a huge tower which once stretched to heaven, built on many presumably immortal spiritual pillars. The abandoned churchyard quakes and forgotten graves open and from them rise forgotten ghosts. Spots appear on the sun and the sun grows dark, and what theory can fight with darkness?
– Wassily Kandinsky
I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me.
– Jo Harjo
Give me illusion, hope, desire and don’t forget me.
– Frida Kahlo
By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
– George Saunders
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid—
Weak masters though ye be—I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
– Shakespeare
All I have is the nostalgia that comes from a mistaken life.
– Clarice Lispector
I ONCE DID A BAMBOO PAINTING FOR SOMEBODY –
NOW HE WANTS ME TO DO ANOTHER. I HAVE WRITTEN
THIS TO ANSWER HIM.
This bamboo I painted a long time ago.
Now you want me to do another?—Impossible!
When the sparrow grows old
it becomes a clam in the sea.
You ask it to turn back into a sparrow,
but how can it fly again?
– Xu Wei, (tr. Jonathan Chaves)
Strongest minds are often those whom the noisy world hears least.
– Wordsworth
Never let the world defeat you in that most tragic of ways: by making you cynical and making you think your cynicism is wisdom.
– Joseph Fasano
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
– Franz Wright
Hysterical self-deceivers, and ordinary ones too, have at all times understood the art of misusing everything so as to avoid the demands and duties of life, and above all to shirk the duty of confronting themselves. They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists.
– Carl G. Jung
I believe…that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.
– Chinua Achebe
Organic Bloom
The brain constructs its systems to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.
– Stanley Kunitz
Sometimes I want to scream but screaming is not in my nature, so I shut down and sleep for days and days and days until I wake up and feel completely
silenced.
– Juansen Dizon
Not magic as a bending of existence to your will, but magic as the capacity for wonder and trust in a God that can do all.
– Martin Shaw
But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.
– Anthony Doerr
The opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of your body will never make you ill. What stays in there will.
– Edith Eger
How can we know the intentions of another? We can only project. And in our wisest moments, question our own projections.
– Kenneth Folk
I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.
– Michelle de Kretser
Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive.
– Philip Roth
fireflies
the meadow
wearing constellations
– Aoi
If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey.
– William H. Gass
What I liked about the rainbow is that it fits all of us. It’s all the colors. It represents all the genders. It represents all the races. It’s the rainbow of humanity.
– Gilbert Baker
Seeing God as the underlying Reality is the way to solve the problem of being caught up in the delusive distortions of our material experiences.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I haven’t abandoned you,
my little ally, my heart.
I kiss you with all my soul.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live.
– Kafka
I don’t think I was built for a love that is comfortable or uncomplicated. There is a restlessness in me that will always be drawn to dark, madly passionate things. The intoxicating highs and devastating lows. The chaos and the conflict.
– Beau Taplin
Whatever you’re doing is always to yourself. Whatever you do to another human being, good or bad you’re only doing it to yourself. For there is one energy. And we’re all endless atoms and all energy.
– Robert Adams
I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.
– Elizabeth Wurtzel
summer stars
every wish
starts quietly
– Akri
Inner awakening is not an experience you have once.
It is a way of meeting life again and again with more awareness and less reaction.
– Remez Sasson
I have survived,
but I have not been
spared.
– Catherynne M. Valente
Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
summer clouds
nothing beautiful
stays one shape
– Akari
Isn’t it strange that we talk least about
the things we think about most?
– Charles Lindbergh
Innkeepers never looked for anything better than tantrums from the people fate compelled them to entertain.
– C. S. Forester
nighttime rain
stripes down the window
no stars to be seen
– Mueder Krieger
People do not see
you, / They invent you
and accuse you.
– Hélène Cixous
Can the absence of words tell a story? Like a pattern in lace, the holes as important as the threads?
– Eden Robins
The saddest truth is realizing you have fallen madly
in love with what can never be.
– Michael Faudet
And then it finally occurred to me, you were never going to live up to the person I made you out to be.
– Vivi Dale
summer shower
a paper lantern
goes dark
– Basho
We are all One, all children of the same loving Source, all brothers and sisters on the journey back home.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
midlife —
still wasting time
on side quests
– Mueder Krieger
I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
– Isaac Newton
I know I’ll always think of you with something like
hurt and nostalgia – and a great deal of love.
– Sylvia Plath
True silence doesn’t put you to sleep. It jolts you awake so that you’re suddenly alive to the world.
– Pico Iyer
I melt at your glances and become music.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I’m neither beautiful nor admirable. I’m tired and I’m bruised.
– Martha Gellhorn
Our children can be our greatest teachers if we are humble enough to receive their lessons.
– Bryant McGill
How amazing it is to find someone who wants to
hear about all the things that go on in your head.
– Nina LaCour
I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.
– Charles Bukowski
We talk so much of light,
please let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
– Maggie Smith
Although the very essence of being is utterly lucid and unobscured, it appears to be obscured. This is similar to the sun being covered by clouds. It is due to the influence of adventitious distortions that the natural manifestation of dharmakaya is not evident.
– Longchenpa
blueberries
little victories
taste sweeter
– Aoi
It’s July and I
have hope in who
I am becoming.
– Charlotte Eriksson
Beautiful. Crushingly
so. You look like the rest
of my life.
– Beau Taplin
My body was suddenly becoming uninhabitable and, for a few instants, I couldn’t see anything.
– Antonio Moresco
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
When someone is properly grounded
in life, they shouldn’t have to look
outside themselves for approval.
– Epictetus
fireflies
every tiny light
keeps its promise
– Akari
I think Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has caused the entire world to disconnect with our bodies. It’s our bodies where we feel at home, or like a stranger, not the mind. The mind follows what happens in the body. When the body is regulated we are good, when it’s not we are not.
– Christine Forner
Even if someone did offer me this unconditional, total, all-embracing love, I would not be able to accept it since it would force me into an infantile dependency which I, as an adult, cannot tolerate.
– Henri Nouwen
It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have an admittedly idealistic attachment to kindness, because kindness and kindliness means that you are acting on a natural instinct towards your kin…I think one really has to hang on to that.
– Tom Stoppard
Information is the food
of the mind. But more
information isn’t always
good for you. It’s actually
good, occasionally,
to take time for
information fasts.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Heaven is where you’ll be when you are okay where you are.
– Sun Ra
The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.
– Michelle Tea
Life is shapeless, but art, as everybody knows, is shaped.
– Stanley Elkin
We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.
– Aldous Huxley
Great things to the great,
depths to the profound,
subtleties to the subtle,
and rarities to the rare.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasising machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
– Paul Kingsnorth
Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.
– Russell Kirk
Realization must be amidst all the turmoils of life.
– Ramana Maharshi
Do not be misled by my eating and smoking, reading and talking. My mind is not here, my life is not here. It is your private dream-world and my only reaction to it is to ask you to stop dreaming. I do not even perceive it, except through what you tell me about it.
– Nisargadatta
It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
– Edmund Burke
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free.
Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom
nature endowed with minds higher than the mass of men.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
LIFE EQUATION
My daddy was a bass line, and mom
an anthology of Newark nights—
her arm a high-rise poem
he would run his baritone blue cipher over,
over and over again.
They loved in translation, grew apart,
grew to love me from different homes—
leaving me an adulteration of the blues,
of the absence and question they live.
– Kyle Dargan
Pursue the authentic—decide first / what is authentic, / then go after it with all your heart.
– Louise Erdrich
PART OF ME WANTING EVERYTHING TO LIVE
This New England kind of love reminds me
of the potted chrysanthemum my husband
gave me. I cared for it faithfully,
turning the pot a quarter turn each day
as it sat by the window. Until the blossoms
hung with broken necks on the dry stems.
Cut off the dead parts and watched
green leaves begin, new buds open.
Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die
unless I forced it to. The new flowers
were smaller and smaller, resembling
little eyes awake and alone in the dark.
I was offended by the lessening,
by the cheap renewal. By a going on
that gradually left the important behind.
But now it’s different. I want the large
and near, and endings more final. If it must
be winter, let it be absolutely winter.
– Linda Greg
If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
– Anton Chekhov
Granada
by M. Cynthia Cheung
Here, a thin silk canopy,
avenues where orange blossoms bruise
under sun. We sit in the courtyard, distant
mountains gleaming behind your wasted face.
How long since your tongue could taste
iron in meltwater, your fingers deft
enough to pluck a pomegranate seed
without bursting? What I imagine
is vanishing-language
you will take beyond the peaks.
I should not blame silence
on the dead—nor ruin of pleasure-
but who else to blame?
For all the pain in this world, you say,
I love this life. Light traverses
your face, translucent.
We hold stillness in our hands, listen
to fountains speak.
the crowd is the gathering place of the weakest
what are called remarkable individualities
are often only well-known nonentities. isolation is the gift.
– Charles Bukowski
An aspiring writer without knowledge, experience, and support is a person who most needs the empathy and guidance of those who are farther down the road.
– Ellen Notbohm
It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking.
– Meghan O’Gieblyn
The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing.
– John Bowlby
I detest the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another.
– Homer
Very early in my life it was too late.
– Marguerite Duras
That’s what writers, especially immigrant writers, struggle with, to write about ourselves, our families, our countries, knowing that the outcome can bring us both joy and pain.
– Rebecca Morrison
It’s not a shame if a man learns something from a woman’s heart, which makes him more gentle and human.
– Nizar Qabbani
Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
new moon
the whole forest
starts over
– Aoki
I have seen greatness and power, wealth, prosperity and incomparable development. I was never sad that we are a small and unfinished part of the world. To be small, unsettled and uncompleted is a good and courageous mission.
– Karel Čapek
in sky and sea
whites and blues adrift …
years in exile
– Chen-ou Liu
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.
– Aldous Huxley
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
– Marcus Aurelius
The human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.
– Henri Bergson
You are the changeless reality in which the world of changes appears.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
But there was something magical about my idea. I had to admit, I felt better and happier when it was around.
– Kobi Yamada
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
– Aldous Huxley
The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.
– Charles King on Edward Gibbons
Software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.
– Zadie Smith
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
– Umberto Eco
Watching the water pass through on a river during the sunset is a great reminder that nothing is permanent. “There is nothing permanent except change.
– Heraclitus
The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both the right and necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it.
– bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
Dualism… Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
– Aldous Huxley
The richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself; and … the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself, for the greatness is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and every human being can be this if he so wills it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation-the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing-is essential for high levels of creativity.
– Daniel H. Pink
The results of our actions are experienced right here. There is no other field in which they could possibly bloom.
– the Buddha
The two evening stars were now shining side by side. The smaller one had moved over to the big one. They were very close now, almost touching, and then they went together and become one very large star. I don’t know if things like that are fair or not.
– Richard Brautigan
The moment a police force becomes the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature, that police force has ceased to be a protecter of the people and has become a threat to the people.
– Malcolm X
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
– Aldous Huxley
Let a person lift themselves by themselves; let them not degrade themselves. For the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is the enemy of the self.
– Bhagavad Gita
Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
The nation is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
– Benedict Anderson
In warfare every opportunity must be seized; for fortune is a woman; if you miss her today, do not expect to find her tomorrow.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.
– John Dewey
We are likely to look too far away for the mainsprings of democratic society. Democracy rests on you and me, and not on the man who holds office. This demands the highest personal development of every citizen, of every age and in every range. It means popular education.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
King Crimson is what progressive music is all about. It’s not reproducing something that was radical 30 years ago, but the more difficult route of putting aside old ways of playing to try to come up with meaningful new music. It’s a noble quest, whether you achieve it or not.
– Tony Levin
You strive to please others, to fit in, and feel accepted. In spite of that, you still don’t feel accepted, and not because others don’t accept you, but because you haven’t accepted yourself as you are.
– Dragos Bratasanu
Toughness and empathy are not incompatible.
– Robert Greene
I have felt for a long time that our idea of what a human being is has grown oppressively small and dull.
– Marilynne Robinson
The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work… Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.
– C.S. Lewis
If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
– William James
No poem is ever written for it’s story line’s sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary.
– Joseph Brodsky
Ethics is, above all, an invitation to live with humanity.
– Fernando Savater
Love all, serve all.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
They who truly come to God for mercy, come as beggars, and not as creditors: they come for mere mercy, for sovereign grace, and not for anything that is due.
– Jonathan Edwards
I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate shining segments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. At night … poems are like spiraling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.
– Stanisław Lem
To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It’s the only thing that lasts, that’s worth working for, worth fighting for…
– Alexandra Ripley
If you chase butterflies, they will fly away, but if you build a garden, they will come to you, and even if they don’t, you will still have a beautiful garden…
– German saying
Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it’s not the love of other humans that will make us happy.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.
– Annie Ernaux
Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.
– Patti Smith
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
– Beryl Markham
I accept that I am affected by the things that affect me. I am independent and I am free.
– James Constable
But here’s the thing: true piercing kindness will ruin your life. It will wreck your schedule. It will screw with your politics. It will force you to unlearn your cleverness and confront your cowardice and care about people who do not care about you. And it will hurt. And it will be the holiest thing you’ve ever done…
– David Gate
If you are identified with the form of the world, you are identified with change, because all life is programmed to evolve.
– Richard Rudd
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundation under them.
– Henry David Thoreau
Creative people need quiet because everything speaks to them.
– unknown
There are nights we seem to ride
With cross and crown
Forth under them, through fumes,
Coils, the whole rattling epic-
Only to leap clear-eyed.
From eiderdown,
Asleep to what we’d seen.
– James Merrill
Be a perfect flow of energy in whatever you chose to do. This is perfect action.
– Frederick Lenz
When people want to love you, let them. When people open a door like that, never close it, not even to hide.
– Kim Zarins
We’re creative. We’re gonna sit at our desks typing while the walls fall down around us. Because we’re the least important, most important thing there is.
– Donald Draper
It is not selfish to be happy. It is your highest purpose. Your joy is the greatest contribution you can make to life on the planet. A heart at peace with its owner blesses everyone it touches.
– Alan Cohen
People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.
– W. Edwards Deming
I understand it now. You can’t shut anything out. You have to open yourself completely and just receive. Let it get close to you, everything that is, and love it.
– Ebba Haslund
Good people are dying from taking on other people’s drama.
– James H Kithcart
If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.
– John Clare
Christ is not merely a harbor of refuge, but a port for all weathers.
– Charles Spurgeon
The reconnection of society, economy and ethics is a project we cannot postpone.
– Michael D. Higgins
What I learned from my parents is that it all matters. What’s going on in the world, in the courts, the government, the councils, the prisons, the villages, the school, the woods, the farms, the rivers. What’s being said in books and plays and poetry and scientific journals and television shows and films and newspapers. All of it matters.
– Helen Kingston
The heart is a throne; let the King sit.
– Hafiz
O Lord you are from everlasting to everlasting; I turn my thoughts to you as the hours of darkness and of sleep begin. O sun of my soul, I rejoice to know that all night I shall be under the watchful eye of the one who dwells in eternal light. Into your care, Father, I now entrust my body and soul.
– John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer
The difficulty, in sociology, is to think in a completely astonished way about things you thought you had always understood.
– Pierre Bourdieu
When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.
– William Shakespeare
Anything that just cost money is cheap.
– John Steinbeck
Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.
– Rita Levi Montalcini
Necrocracy. Rule by the dead. We have members of Congress dropping dead in office, running while dying, signing bills while nearly comatose, vanishing for months at a time, and a president who is “leaving instructions” for what to do if he passes.
– Mike Rothschild
Live amongst people in such a manner that if you die, they weep over you, and if you are alive, they crave for your company.
– Imam Ali
There’s no trail in space,
no outside contemplative,
no eternal fabrications,
no wavering in the Awakened
– Dhammapada 255
The heart grows
brutal from feeding
on fantasies.
– Robert Pinsky
The understanding of what you are, whatever it be—ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous—the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.
– Krishnamurti
Then, for instance, your passions which seemed so real, more real than God, show their illusory nature to you and sort of dwindle away.
– Henri Nouwen
If you want to know a person, discuss politics, religion and women with him.
– Albert Camus
Forgive me, for all
the things I did
but mostly for the ones
that I did not.
– Donna Tartt
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
– Leo Tolstoy
Working on a problem reduces
the fear of it.
It’s hard to fear a problem when
you are making progress on it—
even if progress is imperfect and
slow.
Action relieves anxiety.
– James Clear