Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.

 

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

 

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it-Robin Williams

 

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading

-b.f. skinner

 

it is not the critic who counts;
Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly
so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

 

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. – Aldous Huxley

 

there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

-        Gilbert K. Chesterton

Many traffic lights and lift buttons are actually placebo buttons – in other words, they do nothing at all when pressed. They exist to give the presser the feeling of control. 

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. 
-Robert Frost 

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself. 
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 

“Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.”

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves”

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.”

 

         -   Carl Jung

 

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

       -  Oscar Wilde

 

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."

 "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." — Mark Twain

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." — Roald Dahl

 

 

Because your life is a work of art, you make decisions in an attempt to mold it into something beautiful, something without a price or any other value expressed by language.  This life, your masterpiece, can only truly be appreciated when you turn away from the past towards the present.  – Austin Miller

 

'I smiled, "Deoch, my heart is made of stronger stuff than glass. When she strikes she'll find it strong as iron-bound brass, or gold and adamant together mixed. Don't think I am unaware, some startled deer to stand transfixed by hunter's horns. It's she who should take care, for when she strikes, my heart will make a sound so beautiful and bright that it can't help but bring her back to me in winged light."'
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

 

"Let me say one thing before I start. I've told stories in the past, painted pictures with words, told hard lies and harder truths. Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this. Trying to make you understand her with nothing more than words. You have never seen her, never heard her voice. You cannot know.""

 

'You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.'"

 

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”

-  Margaret Thatcher

 

I'll never stop asking questions because that's everything I don't want to be.  We are creatures of habit; I see it every day.  People live their entire lives hoarding their 'things' and clinging to the familiar.  I exist to change, and change, and change.  That is perfection to me.    – Austin Miller

 

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in the newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army. 

     —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Dear Sir:  I request that you do not make the intended visit with me.  As the result of the observations and impressions of recent years I no longer desire personal contact with you.

 —Sigmund Freud in letter to Herbert Silberer, ejecting him him from the     

     Psycholanalytic Society

 

Upon him I will visit famine and a fire,

Till all around him desolation rings

And all the demons in the outer dark

Look on amazed and recognize

That vengeance is the business of a man.

 

"A lady came up to me one day and said 'Sir! You are drunk', to which I replied 'I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.'" — Winston S. Churchill (kirk m.

 

habit is the sharpest double-edged sword i know of

n  Austin Miller 

 

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”

 

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."
   —Chris McCandless

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

   --Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

  —Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

 

“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road” — Stephen Hawking

 

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew. 
-Charles Dickens 

 

Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mysteries. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

 

The most dangerous man alive.

  - Richard M. Nixon on Timothy Leary

 

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

-=-Albert Einstein

 

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

—Albert Einstein

 

 

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.

—Alfred A. Montapert

 

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

—Abraham Lincoln

 

 

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."--Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

 

“Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.” – Karen Ravn

 

There can be no question: the psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance.  This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.  Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved to us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we may yet see delineated something of our still human course.  To hear and profit, however, one may have to submit somehow to purgation and surrender.  And that is part of our problem: just how to do that. 

“Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you?”

-J. Cambell, p. 87, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

 

 

“The problem is not new, for all ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other.  Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious..Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were.  But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.”

-C. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” par. 50)

 

Stuart: It is no more crazy than a dog finding a rainbow. Dogs are colourblind, Gretchen. They don't see colour. Just like we don't see time. We can feel it, we can feel it passing, but we can't see it. It's just like a blur. It's like we're riding in a supersonic train and the world is just blowing by, but imagine if we could stop that train, eh, Gretchen? Imagine if we could stop that train, get out, look around, and see time for what it really is? A universe, a world, a thing as unimaginable as colour to a dog, and as real, as tangible as that chair you're sitting in. Now if we could see it like that, really look at it, then maybe we could see the flaws as well as the form. And that's it; it's that simple. That's all I discovered. I'm just a... a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I'm that dog who saw a rainbow, only none of the other dogs believed me. 
Gretchen: I believe you. 

 

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

 

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

 

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

 

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

There's one sad truth in life I've found
While journeying east and west -
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream. -Edgar Allan Poe

 

"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"
--John Greenleaf Whittier

 

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

 

The difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is how you use them. 

 

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

—André Gide

 

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet." ~ Jack London

The secret of being a bore... is to tell everything.
-Voltaire

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.   – rumi

 

Self-confidence is not a feeling of superiority, but of independence.

– Lama Yeshe

 

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. -Charles Darwin

 

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, then wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

 

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

—André Gide

 

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

the mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

-wilhelm steke

 

 

'All that is gold does not glitter'

 

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

 

J.R.R. Tolkien

 

The first thing a missionary teaches a savage is indecency = Mark Twain, in a letter to his wife (says Casey, *ethos questionable*)

 

Scarlet fleeting, potent, and mesmerizing

Snow leopard, stoic, patient, and carnal

Walden pond   wild deep and pure

Calm recollective and new

 

See yourself

See other people

Sex life

Death

 

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

 

~William Faulkner

 

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

—Harry G. Frankfurt - On Bullshit

 

“In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love. The word ’fall’ is not right. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. They cannot manage and they cannot stand – they find a woman and they are gone, they find a man and they are gone. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have that integrity to stand alone.

 

A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it – no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love. And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone; they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality, in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual.

 

 

Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love? Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That’s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced – they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned.

 

 

Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.”

—       Osho

 

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

 

One man with courage is a majority.

—Thomas Jefferson

 

"Eventually capitalists will be too efficient at extracting value from labor, to the point that labor will be unable to buy their own products, thus leading to economic collapse/revolution."

 

 

“We have not touched the stars,

nor are we forgiven, which brings us back

to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,

not from the absence of violence, but despite

the abundance of it. The lawn drowned, the sky on fire,

the gold light falling backward through the glass

of every room. I’ll give you my heart to make a place

for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger.

Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars

for you? That I would take you there? The splash

of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube? We’ve read

the back of the book, we know what’s going to happen.

The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left

broken in the brown dirt. And then’s it’s gone.

Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye

Goodbye. No more tears.”

—       richard siken

 

Bullshit dude, bullshit. I once ate a tray of 24 assorted muffins: blueberry, lemon poppy-seed, cranberry apple, banana nut, even bran. Large muffins too, like you'd buy at the bakery, not grocery store mini-muffins. I ate the first five or six out of hunger, and the next dozen I can only attribute to gluttony, but the last half dozen were devoured by determination alone. A part of me wanted to stop - I was full, the muffins had become repulsive, and there was a disconcerting pressure in my chest. The other, stronger part of me knew that if I gave up on that muffin platter I would admit limitation. A limited man can rationalize his every weakness, turn away from every challenge, live his life within the narrow confines of comfort; that's not how I live my life. But I digress. It took six days for my bowels to move, and when they did I shat a monolithic muffin block so wide it could not be flushed, so dense it would not dissolve with repeated flushing, and so heavy it took two hands to lift. The measure of anxiety, pain, pride and love is indescribable, so don't tell me I don't understand childbirth.

 

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

—Sylvia Plath

 

 

“Why are you sad?”

“Because you speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings.”

—       Anna Karina, Pierrot Le Fou

 

We were born too soon to explore the cosmos, and too late to explore the earth. Our frontier is the human mind. Religion is the ocean we must cross.

 

“When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught how to fly.”

— by Patrick Overton”

 

“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”

 —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

When I was 18 I wanted to fuck on the floor and break shit. When I was 25 I wanted to fuck on the floor and break shit. When I was 35 I wanted to fuck on the floor and break shit. Now I’m 40 and I want to fuck on the floor and break shit. —Sylvia Plath

 

Subservience and obedience can be coerced.  Understanding and acceptance cannot. 

 

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”

—       Soren Kierkegaard

"Dying? Not at all," said Sirius. "Quicker and easier than falling asleep." - Sirius Black

 

"Feminism is the idea that we can make both sexes equal by focusing solely on the issues of one of them." - Terroja Kincaid, AKA The Amazing Atheist

 

"Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?" - Epicurus.

 

“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

—       Sylvia Plath

 

“A man’s character is his fate.”

—Heraclitus

 

"Unit conversion for 55million deaths per year: 104.6 deaths per minute" - Wolfram|Alpha

 

"Each day is better than the next."

 

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

 

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

 

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service."

 

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

 

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

 

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

 

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

-Steve Jobs

 

Life is hard. And then you die. - Woody Allen

 

"It is too difficult to think nobly when one only thinks to earn a living."

 

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

 

Most of us tip-toe through life to arrive safely at death.

 

"It's a shame that a man can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work." -William Faulkner

 

"Solitude, as death proves, is our natural state." -Ernest Hemingway

 

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."

Edgar Allen-Poe (1809-49)

 

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

—       David Foster Wallace

 

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that -”

—Sylvia Plath

 

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”

—Aristotle

 

“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”

—       Carl Jung

 

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

― Oscar Wilde

 

“I must get back into the world of my creative mind: otherwise, I die. I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.”

—Sylvia Plath

 

“When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

The earth has music for those who listen. –Shakespeare

 

I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.

—Pablo Neruda

 

“But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don’t mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other’s thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about fathers and mothers, childhood, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears (except fear of death). No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor’s boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fool amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.”

—       Don DeLillo, White Noise

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels..."

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 10

 

"What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind."

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 11

 

A lot has happened.  In many ways I'm not the same person I was.  Often I hear people say that sort of thing with positive connotations attached.  I wonder what that's like. 

 

One year ago I was having a beer with Black Moth Super Rainbow, listening to Wayne Coyne talk about weed flavored gummy skulls and dropping acid.  Three years ago I was watching my best friend find love for the first time since his engagement fell apart.  But two years ago, that's when all the static turned to patterns and I was never more at ease than with both feet off the ground.  There was a certain glimmer in my eyes that you can see in the hopelessly optimistic and brazenly stupid that many found themselves smiling back at.  The wanderlust struck me hard and each thought felt clear and light, like a leaf floating on the wind.  More specifically I had finally gotten around to reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac and was leaving the central plains of Oklahoma behind en route to the West Coast. 

 

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

—Anaïs Nin

 

for every mile the feet go

the heart goes nine.”

—e. e. Cummings

 

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”

—Yousuf Karsh

 

Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.  For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.  —Ecclesiastes 1:18

 

“And all I loved, I loved alone.”

—Edgar Allan Poe

 

“I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer

 

 

"Besieged by others, I try to make my escape, without much succcess, it must be confessed. Yet I manage to wangle myself, day by day, a few seconds audience with the man I would have liked to be." — Emil Cioran

 

"... out of my answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities -- until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving flourishing world, like a secret garden the existence of which no one suspected. -- Oh how fortunate we are, we men of knowledge, provided only that we know how to keep silent long enough!" - Nietzsche, preface of On the Genealogy of Morality

 

"Therefore it must be itself that thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking." – Aristotle

 

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time

~Banksy

 

“We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”

—The Book of Disquiet,

 

She was indeed a most beautiful woman.  The kind of beauty that emerged after a second look, or even a third.  Unfolding like a dark flower in jungle shadows.  The pain in those eyes only deepened in anguish. 

-something I read in January and left as a voice memo

 

“Some day I wish to eat cheese with someone from every country in the world. Become a cheese diplomat. They would eat pepper-jack in Spain and Brie in England. I would eat all kinds of cheese. When I grew old, I would tell my grandkids about all the cheeses and people I have tried and met and they will salivate because they will love cheese like me.” - hey_daralon

 

“And I, infinitesima­l being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.”

—       Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

 

The flesh covers

The bone and the

Flesh searches for more than flesh. 

Nobody ever finds

the one. 

The city dumps fill

The junkyards fill

The madhouses fill

The hospitals fill

The graveyards fill

Nothing else fills

 

Oh, this is a good question. My whole aesthetic sense definitely passed through a singularity when I read WATCHMEN. Everything was different after that -- they broke rules I never thought you could break. It happened again with MRS. DALLOWAY, for all the obvious reasons. And again when, in a double whammy, I read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL and my brother's early chapters of SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE in the same month. That was when I shredded (figuratively) everything I'd ever written and started over.

 

I don’t eavesdrop, I listen in. Like a doctor to someone’s chest. And, often, you tap, and there is no echo!  - Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from the Russian by IIya Kaminsky and Jean Valetine, Poetry vol. CXCIX no. 6, March 2012

HM

 

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we

who never let each other sleep above it.

- Marina Tsvetaeva, from “I Know the Truth”

 

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.  –Carl Jung

 

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie. –Carl Jung

 

It is indeed no small matter to know of one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow… Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon.  - Carl Jung

 

“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.”

- Christian Morganstern, German author and poet (1871-1914)

 

“I don’t have to prove that god doesn’t exist. However, show me how you would prove Zeus and Ra don’t exist, & I’ll use your method .”— Anon.

 

In his despair he drew the colors from his own heart.” - Cy Twombly

 

 

 

What exists, I see with certainty. What does not exist, I shall create, if I must.

- Antonin Artaud

 

“I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” by Pablo Neruda

 

“If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “He’s going to hurt me.” Or,”I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore…” Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.” by Ray Bradbury

 

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” by Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

 

“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” by Jack Kerouac

 

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.” by Excerpt from Charles Bukowski’s An Almost Made Up Poem

 

"Forgive me for noting that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less."

 

I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.❞ -Rumi

 

Waiting is a sense beyond the five, not a threshold."

—  Rusty Morrison

 

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."

—  Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-52

 

"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."

—  Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

 

"We haven’t forgotten anything. Forgetting is simply a sensation."

—  César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind

 

 

"You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have."

—  José Saramago

 

 

"I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day,

on the surface of intention, word becoming act.

We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales,

where the snows come from, where the waters begin."

—  Luke Davies

 

"Wandering creates the desert."

—  Edmond Jabès

 

“Ah, the sun will catch me, in my disturbing transparency.

What am I but an awareness of the dark, forever?”

—Edmond Jabès

 

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am, still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.”

—Sylvia Plath

 

“Death will be too late to bring us aid      .

 

What end but love, that stares death in the eye?”

—       William Carlos Williams

 

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”

—Stephen Fry

 

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

—Walt Whitman

 

"the sum total of my existence is whatever the person closest to me at any time perceives me to be

 

 

“One day, when I am a braver man, I will tell her these things, and then I will look her in the eye tell her I love her and ask her to be only mine. But until that day, we’re just friends.”

—Charlie Huston, Already Dead

 

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'

William S. Burroughs

 

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

William S. Burroughs

 

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

― William S. Burroughs

 

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”

― William S. Burroughs

 

“A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.”

― William S. Burroughs

 

“In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.”

― William S. Burroughs

 

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

 

“That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.”

― William S. Burroughs

 

“all abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist.

honesty wrung out of him by pain, he cried out with a loud voice.”

― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

 

“I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“The highest result of education is tolerance.”

—Helen Keller

 

This is the big question of life. You're asking what the meaning of existence is, and I'm not really qualified to give you an answer.

But, I would like to add that religion does not escape these problems either. Let's consider what God really is in terms of the fiction. He's an extremely powerful monarch. He gives people missions in life and punishes us or rewards us depending on how well we follow his rules.

Now I ask you, is this really a satisfactory source of meaning? This philosophy is the ultimate embodiment of might makes right. It's saying that the purpose of life is to follow the orders of someone more powerful.

Why should you revere power? Why should you bend a knee to a being just because He is strong? What if you disagree with God? What if you discover that God values things that you find offensive? Do you still say that He has moral superiority? Do you still let him define your meaning?

If God is real, then the practical thing is to do whatever the hell he says, because he can make you sorry if you don't. But, on a deeper existential level, this does not give your life true meaning.  —damndirtyape (reddit user)

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

 

I am an expert at speaking while barely saying a word; I’ve been speaking without saying a word all my life, and have endured whole inner tragedies without saying a word.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry… Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?

Wally Lamb

 

Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which drifts and turns in the air, and sways, and zigzags to the ground. But others, just a few, are like stars; they travel a fixed route, no wind reaches them; their law and their route lie within themselves.

 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

 

My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.

Hermann Hesse

 

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

Vincent van Gogh

 

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

 

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Aldous Huxley

 

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.

Vincent Van Gogh

 

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees:

but he who is not afraid of my darkness,

will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

T.S. Eliot

 

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

--Abraham Maslow

 

“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

 

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -Lao Tzu

 

"There was a window in the bedroom.

Her bed was beneath it. In the afternoon and with the lamp off

we stretched on the mattress.

Sometimes touching each other, sometimes not.

Sometimes our fingers just lingered,

the day lying across us and the walls,

the color of the walls mixing

with the sun’s dead empty light.

It made everything in the room white.

Soft. Open.

That’s what I remember."

- Southwest of the River, Anis Mojgani

 

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

—Alan Watts

 

My own tentative philosophy is this, that man is a superior animal, that his superiority lies in self-consciousness and self-knowledge.  This self-knowledge includes a realization of a purpose and a meaning of life (whether an affirmative, negative, or neuter meaning) and the ability to use natural force to achieve fulfillment of that meaning.  What that purpose is, other than freedom from physical limitations, and freedom from intellectual limitation, I do not know.  We have invented the machine in order to realize freedom from physical limitations, and we will perfect themachine.  Ethics and philosophy involve the search for freedom from intellectual limitation.  History-the development of civilization-is the development of the slow evolutionary search for this (excuse me if I begin to sound like Allen Ginsberg) physical and intellectual freedom.  History is a river of development-slow and sluggish, pushing relentlessly onward toward the ultimate goal of human perfection: the two freedoms, there is a main current of history, and this current streams inexorably onward, there are eddies and side-streams, rapids and whirlpools, in which human progress is interrupted temporarily, but the main current pours onward in stead flux, (here I simply must be poetic) draining finally into the fathomless oceans of eternity.  Allen Ginsberg, in 1943 letter to Benson Soffer

 

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

—C.S. Lewis

 

 

“I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.”

—Lemony Snicket

 

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” by Zadie Smithbbbbbbbg

 

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

—Joan Didion

 

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.  —Carl Sagan

 

And what disillusionment, what disappointment, was this? It was a disappointment that all men know—the artist most of all. The disappointment of reaching for the flower and having it fade the moment your fingers touch it. It was the disappointment that comes from the artist’s invincible and unlearning youth, from the spirit of indomitable hope and unwavering adventure, the spirit that is defeated and cast down ten thousand times but that is lost beyond redemption never, the spirit that, so far from learning wisdom from despair, acceptance from defeat, cynicism from disillusionment, seems to grow stronger at every rebuff, more passionate in its convictions the older it grows, more assured of its ultimate triumphant fulfillment the more successive and conclusive its defeats.

Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again”

 

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

Kahlil Gibran

 

It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled -- Mark Twain

 

“ If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. – Henry David Thoreau

 

                                                                                               

 

"I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all."  - William S. Burroughs

 

“We sit and talk quietly,

with long lapses of silence,

and I am aware of the stream that has no language,

coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.”

—William Carlos Williams

 

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

—Anonymous

 

It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos. – Woody Allen Movie

 

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

- William Faulkner

 

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

—Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

Paraphrase for Casey “We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

— e e cummings

 

Songs last, good songs will always last. Things that are made with an overly contemporary style tend to be so much of their time that they don’t make it. At the end of the day, that’s my goal. I want to make music like that. Only time will tell if I have or not. I’ll always put songwriting before anything else. Whether it’s something people want to hear from me is to be determined. –Ben Gibbard

 

“I can only believe in a god who dances.”

—Nietzsche

 

If we are to teach real peace in this world we shall have to begin with the children. – Gandhi

 

"It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead... Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace." Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676

 

The notebook is the perfect literary form for the eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’.”

—Susan Sontag

 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” —Proust

 

Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture. Francis Bacon (1605)

 

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.   Borges

 

"You are the books you read the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind. "

 

Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?

Louis XIV (last words)

 

But if you cannot find

a good companion

of integrity and wisdom,

then, like a king departing

a conquered land,

or an elephant wandering

alone in the forest,

walk alone.

Dhammapada 329, Ajahn Munindo rendition

 

Without music, life would be a mistake.... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance. -Friedrich Nietzsche

 

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart. - Franz Kafka

 

For your hair was full of roses, and my flesh was full of thorns.  -Aleister Crowley, La Gitana

 

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. –Epictetus

 

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public. – Epictetus

 

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain. – Epictetus

 

She looked at me like we had prayed on the same cliff- ania mojavea

 

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”

—Alphonse De Lamartine

 

“I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.”  —Andrea Gibson

 

I must die.  But must I die groaning?  I must be imprisoned.  But must I whine as well?  I must suffer exile.  Can anyone then hinder me from going with a smile and a good courage, and at peace?  ’Tell the secret.’  I refuse to tell, for this is in my power.  ’But I will chain you.’  What say you, fellow?  Chain me?  My leg you will chain—yes, but my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that.  ’I will imprison you.’  My bit of body, you mean.  ’I will behead you.’  Why?  When did I ever tell you that I was the only man in the world that could not be beheaded?

 

Show me a man molded to the pattern of the judgments that he utters.  Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy.  Show him me.  By the gods I would fain to see a Stoic.  Nay, you cannot show me a finished Stoic; then show me one in the molding, one who has set his feet on the path.  Do me this kindness, do not grudge an old man like me a sight I never saw till now.  It is a soul I want; let one of you show me the soul of a man who wishes to be one with God, and to blame God or man no longer, to fail in nothing, to feel no misfortune, to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy—one who (why wrap up my meaning?) desires to change his manhood for godhead, and who in this poor body of his has his purpose set upon communion with God.  Show him to me.  Nay, you cannot. 

 

—Epictetus

 

"You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them."

-The Tibetan Book of The Dead

 

Vibrating on a strange frequency since the 80's

 

A mother can go to prison for downloading music, a High Schooler can go to jail for a bag of weed and a cop can get away with murder. What happened to holding people accountable for their actions?

 

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

—Zora Neale Hurston

 

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me… So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”

—Aldous Huxley, Island

 

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds — but I think of you always in those intervals.”

—Salvador Plascencia

 

“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”

—Carl Jung

 

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Threatened One

 

“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

—Virginia Woolf,

 

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“ It seems I’ve stopped speaking with my voice. Part of me fell asleep and just watches. ” —Fernando Pessoa

 

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”— William Golding(via skyfullof)

 

“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I’d been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I’d be there with you now instead of here. Maybe… If I’d said, ‘I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,’ maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn’t do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”  -Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

 

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.” –Pat rothfuss

 

“When a young man complains that a young lady has no heart, it’s pretty certain that she has his”

-George Dennison Prentice

 

“You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.”

-Tupac Shakur

 

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. -Rabindranath Tagore

 

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”

—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

 

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

—

Anaïs Nin

 

Everyone is biased, uses motivated reasoning, succumbs to their emotions and totally favours their in-group.

 

 

The bad news: There is no key to the universe. The good news: It was never locked.

― Swami Beyondananda

 

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then…. I contradict myself.

I am large…. I contain multitudes.”

—Walt Whitman “Song of Myself”

 

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.  -Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” -Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

 

The Science of [Imaginary] XXX

 

““As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.”  -W.B. Yeats

 

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. — Neil Gaiman

 

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

 

You are the music while the music lasts.

— T.S. Eliot

 

“Let your soul stand cool and composed

before a million universes.”

—Walt Whitman (this is endless)

 

The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal.

 

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

—T.S. Eliot

 

“I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break.

—Marya Hornbacher

 

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” by C.S. Lewis

 

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”

—Krishnamurti

 

“And no one will listen to us until we listen to ourselves.”

—

Marianne Williamson

 

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

—

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“I don’t really know what I Love You means, I think it means don’t leave me here alone” - Neil Gaiman

 

sometimes we have to do a real life facebook delete – Margaret Cole 3-12-13 concerning Ali Bloomfields douchebaggery

 

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.  Casey in long ago FB message

 

"He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”

—

Jack Kerouac

 

"One kind word can warm three winter months." - Japanese Proverb

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

― Sigmund Freud

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urge that motivates you.

Keep the channel open.”

—Martha Graham

“If you watch nature how nature deals with adversity continually renewing itself, you can’t help but learn…”

—

Bernie Siegel

“There is a silence into which the world can not intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched. All this today you will remember.”

—From A Course in Miracles - Lesson 164

 

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way. 

–Rumi

 

“I went to your concert and I didn’t feel anything”

—Le Tigre

 

“Feet are smarter than an engine / And dreams are stronger than thighs / And questions are the only answers we need to know that we are alive as I am when I have the mind of a child, asking why is 2 + 3 always equal to 5 ? / Where do people go to when they die? / What made the beauty of the moon? / And the beauty of the sea? / Did that beauty make you? / Did that beauty make me? / Will that make me something? / Will I be something? / Am I something? And the answer comes: already am, always was, and I still have time to be”

—Anis Mojgani

 

We must learn to reawaken and kbeep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

—

Joseph Campbell

 

"Here we are, in the amber of the moment. There is no why." Kurt Vonnegut

 

"Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth." - Pablo Picasso

 

Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

— William Jennings Bryan

"The un-examined life is not worth living, but the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either." — Kurt Baier

Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought." ―Matsuo Basho

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes. — Michelangelo

“In the end the early departed have no longer need of us.”— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"On particularly rough days when I'm sure I can't possibly endure, I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days so far, is 100% and that's pretty good."— Unkown

 "Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder." ~ Aldous Huxley

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

— 

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

.......and whats the point of being the richest and most successful person in the cemetery?

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless. "The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003)

 

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

‘‘ For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him. ’’ Philip K. Dick

My mouth hurt because I was smiling so big.  That happens to me sometimes at shows = Hannah

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness

 

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” 
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”

—

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

 

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Napoleon Bonaparte

 

"touch replaces definitions, instinct goes beyond intelligence. the magic route, the dark night of the soul."

“I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.”

— 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper and more unerringly the new will penetrate into us.”

— 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

“Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.” 
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...”

― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.”

― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

 

“That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.”

― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

I am on a boat.  It is night.  The world has calmed itself, simply to hold me inside all that is darkness, simply to rock me gently. 

What is a critic but one who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely? –cloud atlas

"I met a man with a dollar; we exchange dollars. We each have one dollar. I met a man with an idea. We exchange ideas, and we each have two ideas."

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein

"A MAN IS A METHOD, A PROGRESSIVE ARRANGEMENT, A SELECTING PRINCIPLE, GATHERING HIS LIKE TO HIM, WHEREVER HE GOES. HE TAKES ONLY HIS OWN, OUT OF MULTIPLICITY THAT SWEEPS AND CIRCLES ROUND HIM."- Emerson

My home lies deep in the forest

Just wanted to say how flattering it is that you seem to enjoy my blog

casting spells and manifesting dreams    inblank city/country 

50 points to Slytherin

"I'll have what she's having."

Isn’t it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?"

There are two things that create, protect, and increase a sovereign's rule—soldiers and money – Julius Caesar

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” — Blaise Pascal

"The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her." — JD Salinger, A Girl I Used To Know

 

"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that."

 

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."

"And everything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for."- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”  -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There was so much sadness in everything, even when things worked. —Charles Bukowski

Offense isn't given; it's taken.

They're really not on the decline, SJW/queer theory is well on the rise. Religion is out so a new moral authority has to take its place, people are too stupid and judgmental for anything less.

That's what he said; that SJWs are on the rise and religion is on the decline.

ye are the stars and the heavens of understanding, the soft flowing waters upon which must depend the life of all man.

Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." Jon Ronson

"Do not fall in love with people like me.

I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.

I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people."

""Zero Tolerance" is simply a way for people who don't want to think to regulate others. It excuses them from having to consider every factor, come up with a wise and logical course of action, and to stand behind that action and defend it with an equal amount of wisdom and confidence."

“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything.

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.   —E. E. Cummings

“Not to defend 4chan (or online harassment of dissenting views), because it's definitely a vile, dark corner of the internet. This idea that people are supposed to feel 'safe' everywhere both IRL and online has gotten out of hand. It is great that safe spaces exist, but they can only exist in fairly tight circumstances. An open internet forum is not one of them.

 

This idea of extrapolating the therapy term 'safe space' to the world at large is impractical and it might be that we should keep therapy words in therapy. Hell, I would maintain that safe spaces need access to trained therapists if not their actual presence.”-Me

There's kind of a odd notion that the only people worth celebrating are those who lived by today's social standards; which of course would mean that no figure in history and a majority of those alive now shouldn't be celebrated, so it's a weird way to measure people.

What do you expect? The target audience for 60 Minutes wears adult diapers.

“A cat does not think of stretching, it stretches. But a tree does not even do this. A tree simply sways without the effort of moving itself. That is how she moved.” –Rothfuss

I’ve loved the skyline and wished I’d never see it again… rbateson

There is plenty of time to stand still when we are old and dying faster than we are now.  Rbateson

Sometimes it's easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there's a fair share of blame to go around.  –spotlight

“New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing.” 
― Charles Dickens

David Copperfield Quotes

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David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
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David Copperfield Quotes (showing 31-60 of 191)

“what I want you to be - I don't mean physically but morally: you are very well physically - is a firm fellow, a fine firm fellow, with a will of your own, with resolution. with determination. with strength of character that is not to be influenced except on good reason by anybody, or by anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father, & your mother might both have been” 
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

tags: parenting

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“Mr. Dick, give me your hand, for your common sense is invaluable.” 
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

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“My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!” 
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

tags: procrastination

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“And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.

My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!” 
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield