- Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint .... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
Gustav Flaubert
- Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
Thomas Carlyle (Journal of 1839)
- Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
Carl Jung
- I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
Annie Dillard
- We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley
- The last time I saw him [British sculptor Henry Moore] ... he talked about his new grandson and showed us drawings in a studio he had just built to extend his workday .... I asked him, "Now that you're eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?" With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do!"
Donald Hall
- The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.
Boris Pasternak
- One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.
André Malraux (Man's Fate)
- And this is the simple truth -- that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
José Ortega y Gasset
- Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does the path have a heart? The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point, very few men can stop to deliberate and leave the path.
Don Juan (in Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan)
- The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
- Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.
Meister Eckhart
- A man without a home can't be lost.
Kurt Vonnegut
- Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
Ernest Renan
- Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
- There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams
- What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.
Jean-Paul Sartre
- Life is that which -- pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially -- interrupts.
Cynthia Ozick
- Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
Karlfried Graf Dürkheim
- Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
John Mason Brown
- It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
P.D. Ouspensky
- I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.Rabindranath Tagore
- If logic tells you that life is a meaningless accident, don't give up on life. Give up on logic.
Shira Milgrom
- Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet)
- Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
- Don't worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
- We can do no great things, only small things with great love.
Mother Theresa
- ... that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.William Wordsworth
- To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Anna Louise Strong
- If your everyday practice is to open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that -- then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.
Pema Chödrön
- Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.
George Eliot
- Visiting someone in a hospital recently, I watched an elderly couple. The man was in a wheelchair, the wife sitting next to him in the visitors' room. For the half-hour that I watched they never exchanged a word, just held hands and looked at each other, and once or twice the man patted his wife's face. The feeling of love was so thick in that room that I felt I was sharing in their communion and was shaken all day by their pain, their love, something sad and also joyful: the fullness of a human relationship.
Eda LeShan
- There can be no deep disappointment where there is no deep love.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
- I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine. We will live here together always in my house. I will bring you the best fruits, the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle. I will hunt for you. I am the greatest of the jungle hunters. I will fight for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
- You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his reponsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?
Jane Smiley
- People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you know exactly what to do.
Michelle Vestur
- The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task. The most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite in order to enjoy life. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to further that purpose.
Leo Tolstoy
- The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time, because it's too hard.
John Lennon
- The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
- You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face .... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
- The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm
- All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
Ernest Hemingway
- The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.
J.B. Priestley
- In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to me I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me. Sometimes I have done what I knew was wrong, and have rationalized. But rationalization is a form of desperation. It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one's life.
Anne Truitt
- I think one should forgive and remember .... If you forgive and forget in the usual sense, you're just driving what you remember into the subconscious; it stays there and festers. But to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you've forgiven is achievement.
Faith Baldwin
- Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
John Ruskin
- Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather
- Forgiveness is not simply the absolving of an enemy, or one who has done us wrong. Forgiveness must encompass all those things which disturb the tranquility of our soul: the barking dog that robs you of sleep, the heat of summer, the cold of winter. Forgive the ingrown toenail, the flea that bites; forgive the cranky child, wrinkles, a forgotten birthday.
Barbara Wood
- The amazing process ... begins with the decision not to fight against our vices, not to run away from them nor conceal them, but to bring them into the light. If the desire to be honest is greater than the desire to be good or bad, then the terrific power of our vices will become manifest, and behind the vice the old forgotten fear will turn up (the fear of being excluded from life), and behind the fear the pain (the pain of not being loved), and behind this pain of loneliness the deepest and most powerful and most hidden of all human desires: the desire to love, to give oneself, and to be part of the living stream that we call brotherhood.
Fritz Kunkel
- Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than of lust.
Piers Paul Read
- Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms.
Ding Ling
- The rich are different from us.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Yes, they have more money.
Ernest Hemmingway (replying to F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- If all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go round.
Christina Stead
- When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"
Don Marquis
- I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
William James
- It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.
Malcom Muggeridge
- A man who is ill-adjusted to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister.
Hermann Hesse
- Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
- If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill
- What is to give light must endure burning.
Viktor Frankl
- The sage does not attempt anything very big, and thus achieves greatness.
Lao Tsu (Tao Te Ching 63)
- A man is born gentle and weak. At death he is hard and stiff.
Lao Tsu (Tao Te Ching 76)
- It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
H.L. Mencken (on Harding's inaugural address)
- I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes. I had one thousand and sixty.
Imelda Marcos
- I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: what the hell good would that do?
Ronnie Shakes
When Mark Twain was an impoverished young reporter in Virginia City, he was walking along the street one day with a cigar box under his arm. He encountered a wealthy lady he knew, who said to him reproachfully, "You promised me that you would give up smoking."
"Madam," replied Twain, "this box does not contain cigars. I'm just moving."
The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
- There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot.
Steve Reich
- Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
- If you took a starving dog and made him prosperous, he would not bite you. That's the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain
- To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer. Not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer. But suffering make one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.
Woody Allen
- There are two kinds of people: those who finish what they start, and so on.
Robert Byrne
- I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there; it's so petty.
Imelda Marcos (during her trial for embezzlement)
- Not gifted with genius but honestly holding his experience in his heart, he kept his simplicity and humanity.
Nanao Sakaki (on Issa, haiku master)
- I think that human activity will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active -- not more happy, nor more wise -- than he was six thousand years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe
- I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.
James Baldwin
- Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.
Sam Hamill
- The question becomes: what is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What is the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?
Leonard Cohen
- A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
Martin Heidegger
- It's in the darkness of men's eyes that they get lost.
Black Elk
- We are the hurdles we leap to be ourselves.
Michael McClure
- As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy, and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change.
Ted Simon
- Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
Jerry Garcia
- An old man sat outside the walls of a great city. When travelers approached they would ask the old man, "What kind of people live in this city?" And the old man would answer, "What kind of people lived in the place where you came from?" If the travelers answered, "Only bad people lived in the place where we came from," then the old man would reply, "Continue on; you will find only bad people here." But if the travelers answered, "Only good people lived in the place where we have come from," then the old man would say, "Enter, for here, too, you will find only good people."
Yiddish folk tale
- Sixty years ago, you could simply take your children out into the barn; even if you lived in the cities, there were working men all around you. Chances are your son would learn to use his body. But more and more now the children are going to the Internet ... and the danger is that it will simply cause deeper isolation among many young males than they already have. It is a lie to say that there is communication going on. It is just a form of chatter. True communication takes place when two people are standing close to each other -- maybe a foot away -- so that you can feel when the other person is lying, through his body.
Robert Bly
- We must be fond of the world, even in order to change it.
G.K. Chesterton
- To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
William James
- The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
Leo Tolstoy
- If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.
Sir Walter Scott
- Tomorrow is a great deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.
Samuel Johnson
- There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Louis L'Amour
- Almost anything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi
- The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
Ernest Hemmingway
- How do I work? I grope.
Albert Einstein
- The pitcher cries for work to carry and a person for work that is real.
Marge Piercy
- Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Annie Dillard
- You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.
Robert Henri
- The great thing and the hard thing is to stick to things when you have outlived the first interest, and not yet got the second, which comes with a sort of mastery.
Janet Erskine Stuart
- In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Wendell Berry
- That which hinders your task is your task.
Sanford Meisner
- The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.
Meister Eckhart
- In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it ... a sure sense that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.
John Ruskin
- I often suggest that my students ask themselves the simple question: Do I know how to live? Do I know how to eat? How much to sleep? How to take care of my body? How to relate to other people? ... Life is the real teacher, and the curriculum is all set up. The question is: are there any students?
Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath
- Great talents ripen late; the highest notes are hard to hear.
Lao Tsu (Tao Te Ching 41)
- Often nothing keeps the pupil on the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now beginning to dawn on him .... How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to help him endure his loneliness: he turns him away from himself, from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself has done, and to "climb on the shoulders of his teacher."
Eugen Herrigel (Zen in the Art of Archery)
- Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud
- Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.
Lao Tsu (Tao Te Ching 20)
- A friend's son was in the first grade. His teacher asked the class, "What is the color of apples?" Most of the children answered red. A few said green. Kevin, my friend's son, raised his hand and said white. The teacher tried to explain that apples could be red, green, or sometimes golden, but never white. Kevin was quite insistent and finally said, "Look inside."
Joseph Goldstein
- Human speech is like crude rhythms tapped on cracked kettles for bears to dance to ... and all the while we long to make music that will move the stars to pity.
Gustav Flaubert
- Such things and deeds as are not written down are covered with darkness, and given over to the sepulchre of oblivion.
Ivan Bunin
- For Christ sake write and don't worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece or what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.
Ernest Hemingway
- If you wish to be a writer, write.
Epictetus
- No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
- There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
- If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
Charlie Parker
- Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Paddy Chayefsky
- There is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
E.H. Gombrich
- There are things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them. They are felt, they are conceived, but they are not explained; and yet these things constitute the elevated style .... Those ... who want to arrive at this ... perfection ... should seek out ... the most illustrious models ... and this ... having purified their taste, developed their sentiments, and brought them as near as possible to the beautiful, may perhaps reveal to them the innate spark which may some day ... illumine their talent and ... render them worthy of being ... cited and imitated in the future.
Jean Baptiste Arban (last words to the student in his Method for Cornet)
- I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.
Andrew Wyeth
- Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thoughts all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.
Hermes Trismegistus
- If there be anywhere on earth [where] a lover of God is always kept safe from falling, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in the same precious love.
Julian of Norwich
- There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha
- Desolate through forests and fearful in jungles,
he is seeking an Ox which he does not find.
Up and down dark, nameless, wide-flowing rivers,
in deep mountain thickets he treads many bypaths.
Bone-tired, heart-weary, he carries on his search
for this something which he yet cannot find.
At evening he hears cicadas chirping in the trees.
...
Barechested, barefooted, he comes into the marketplace.
Muddied and dust-covered, how broadly he grins!
Without recourse to mystic powers,
withered trees he swiftly brings to bloom.Kuoan Shihyuan (Ten Oxherding Pictures)
- All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you -- begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek eternally for Buddhahood.
Huang Po (The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, translated by John Blofeld)
- It is not that I understood from the moment I was born but that after exhaustive investigation and grinding discipline in an instant I knew myself.
Rinzai
- Who would have thought that the essence of my teaching would be destroyed by this blind donkey?
Rinzai (last words to his disciple Sansho)
- 'Tis all a checquer-board of nights and days,
Where destiny, with men for pieces, plays,
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one, back in the closet, lays.Edward Fitzgerald (The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)
- Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.
Siegbert Tarrasch
- The winner is the one who makes the next-to-last mistake.
Savielly Tartakower
- Without error, there is no brilliancy.
Emanuel Lasker
- Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
- Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso