Recognize

Things are always changing, so nothing can be yours. We don't need to learn how to let things go; we just need to learn to recognize when they've already gone.
--Shunryu Suzuki

With Love

If your life is a leaf
that the seasons tear off and condemn,
they will bind you with love
that is graceful and green as a stem.
--Leonard Cohen

The Holidays

The holidays are upon us again--it sounds vaguely aggressive, as if the holidays were some sort of mugger, or overly enthusiastic lover.
--Eric Weiner

The Word

Is the human word truly powerful enough to change the world and influence history?
--Václav Havel

To See

To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
--William Blake

Adjectives

I truly, truly hate it when technocrats extol "efficient" and "cheap" as if these things were inherent virtues rather than simply...adjectives. Masturbation may be the most efficient, least expensive (no dinners or anniversary gifts required!) way to achieve an orgasm. Doesn't make it the best way.
--Lisa K.

Patience

Patience joins time to eternity.
--Wendell Berry

The Time

Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong...
--Philip Levine

Truth

Truth is one. It doesn't change.
--William Faulkner

Glimpse

To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
--Karen Sunde

Simplest Answer

Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate.
(Plurality should not be assumed without necessity.)
(The mind should not multiply entities beyond necessity.)
(What can be done with fewer...is done in vain with more.)
(The simplest answer is usually the correct one.)
--William of Ockham (aka, Occam's Razor)

Control

You who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes 'round to your soul.
--Leonard Cohen

The Valleys

No one lives on the top of the mountain. It's fine to go there occasionally--for inspiration, for new perspectives. But you have to come down. Life is lived in the valleys. That's where the farms and gardens and orchards are, and where the plowing and the work is done. That's where you apply the visions you may have glimpsed from the peaks.
--Arthur Gordon

Who You Are

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

Whole

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.
--Roger Caras

Dogs

No one is a saying that dogs or any animals are human. They are saying that dogs are sentient beings with a rich and complex life of their own, and that they deserve to be allowed to live that life or as close to it as possible.
--Fara Field

Stories

It is said that babies learn language in order to tell the stories already in them.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Chains

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
--Rosa Luxemburg

Capitalism

For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.
--John Maynard Keynes

Sacred

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
--Wendell Berry

Life

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
--Oscar Wilde

Gangs

This is not a collegial body anymore. It is more like gang behavior.
--Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN, since 1982)

Aspire

That's the "war without end" objection. It's not that it will take a long time. It's that it will take forever, and we will cease being what we aspire to be in the meantime.
--Carlo Graziani

Fear

Fear is the foundation of most governments.
--John Adams

The Machine

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
--Mario Savio (Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, 1964)

Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time.
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Labor

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
--Wendell Phillips (b. 1811)

Traces of Happiness

This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed.
--Italo Calvino

Money

We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket.
--Matt Taibbi

The Dots

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
--Steve Jobs

Disconnect

The disconnect between the seriousness of our angst and the silliness of our politics--between how big our problems are and how hopeless or just plain stuck the people who are supposed to address them seem--defies belief.
--Frank Bruni

Success

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
--Thomas Wolfe

Champion

We forget that the United States is to boardroom looting what Nigeria is to email scams--the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
--Brett Arends

Truth

The definition of hell: truth realized too late.
--E. O. Wilson

Experience

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
--Oscar Wilde

Be...

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few.
--Benjamin Franklin

Remembering

Some would have us believe that remembering every year has no significance, that it is laughable, that it is important to move past the memory of a thing to create art, or to make jokes, or to have a new and different life. Those things happen, because time will not allow us to remain physically in one position. Remembering is about being human. It is about being alive.
--Kara VanderBijl

Myth and Ritual

We're Johnny come lately. We live in the boondocks. We emerged from microbes. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. And on top of all of this, we're making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves. The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open, we find ourselves in bottomless free-fall. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through this, who among us could not sympathize?
--Carl Sagan

Rom Com

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.
--Mindy Kaling

Morality

Premature fiscal tightening is, warns experience, as big a danger as delayed tightening would be. There are no certainties here. The world economy--or at least that of the advanced countries--remains disturbingly fragile. Only those who believe the economy is a morality play, in which those they deem wicked should suffer punishment, would enjoy that painful result.
--Martin Wolf (economics editor of the Financial Times)

The Rich

How's that little fairy tale go again? We're supposed to let the rich pile up more and more because then they're going to run around and start all these businesses and employ everybody. How's that workin' out for ya?
--Back Across the River

Change

Social change happens in many ways, but one primary and inescapable way is that people who are passionate and informed and courageous make personal testimony to others.
--Cary Tennis

Own

Those who own the country ought to govern it.
--John Jay

Markets

Our economy is based on artifacts. Property, contract, money, corporations, these are all economic domains based on law and convention. Markets themselves are not natural, they are products of law. There is no such thing as "the market," with necessary and natural features. There are markets.
--The Current Moment

The Future

I've seen the future, and it's much like the present, only longer.
--Dan Quisenberry

Serenity

Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test is always your own serenity.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Tyranny

The rebel, unlike the revolutionary, does not attempt to undermine the social order as a whole. The rebel attacks the tyrant; the revolutionary attacks tyranny.
--Octavio Paz

Empathy

Those lacking empathy don't know they don't have it.
--McTavish

Comprehending

Our weakness may indeed prevent us from winning but not from comprehending the force by which we are crushed.
--Simone Weil

Two Nations

The U.S. is slowly dividing into two nations, one that can't get what it needs and one that has everything and always wants more. That's how you get people in the U.S. making $200,000 a year--unquestionably rich relative to the median--whining that they're just humble middle class.
--David Roberts

Dead Soon

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
--Steve Jobs (commencement address, Stanford University 2005)

Properity

Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the Public Treasury.
--President Herbert Hoover (December 1930)

Split

The inhabitants of the executive suites in a lot of our U.S. corporations often display split personalities. One minute they are the CEO as warrior king, ready to brave whatever challenge may come, the next minute they are the CEO as Chicken Little, ready to proclaim that the sky is falling because our government has the gall to ask them to pay the cost of doing business in America.
--Kris Broughton

Offerings

Not that the world was under any obligation to appreciate the gifts he'd tried to give--but the question remained: if what you offer the world isn't needed, then why continue to bring it your offerings?
--Brian Morton

Ideas

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
--John Cage

Don't Even Know

We don't even know what we are, where we come from, why we're here, what we're supposed to do. How can we know the nature of something much bigger than us? We are limited by sight, hearing, physical senses, smells, tastes, thoughts, emotions. How can we think these tools give us a clear picture of what is beyond self-preservation in an unknown sea of hazards? Why do we feel we need God, a notion or understanding of God? Isn't it to feel safe?
--Steve Eatenson

Markets

The markets didn't crash because we were paying too much to teachers.
--Eric Schneiderman (Attorney General, New York State)

More Is More

My editor at Random House, Joe Fox, used to tell me, "Stanley, less is more." He wanted to strike--oh, he had a marvelous eye for the "good" stuff--and that's what he wanted to strike. I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess because I don't believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.
--Stanley Elkin

Again

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
--Walt Whitman

Humble

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and I think truer is to consider him created from animals.
--Charles Darwin

Cuts

If too many Americans don't believe in or understand what government does to help them, to offset recessions, to protect their security in retirement and in hard times, to maintain the infrastructure, to provide educational opportunities and health care decent enough to offset the disadvantages so many are born with...if those functions are unknown, underfunded, and/or carried out poorly, why should they care about how much this deal or the next one cuts?
--Jared Bernstein

Capital Gains

In my experience earning income from capital gains is a lot easier than earning ordinary income. Why not tax both at the same rate? It only seems fair.
--Leonard E. Burman (deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration)

Values

The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
--Jared Diamond

Kindness

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverance for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
--Brendan Behan

Black Dots

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
--Vincent van Gogh

Social Media

Social media isn't about having a conversation with people you know. It's about advertising yourself. It's not social; it's media. Real conversations don't happen in public.
--Erin Biba

Storytelling

Every political failure in a democracy begins with bad storytelling. When false narratives and incoherent story lines dominate public conversation, poor decisions are sure to follow.
--Gene Lyons

Learning

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
--Leon Trotsky

Not A Thing

When the recession began there were many wise words about having learnt the lessons of both the Great Depression and Japan's long malaise. Now we know we didn't learn a thing.
--Joseph Stiglitz

Double Dip

I keep wondering when they'll stop saying "double-dip recession," making it sound like a Baskin-Robbins promotion. I keep wondering when they'll start saying the dread D-word: Depression.
--Ron Rosenbaum

Climate Change

The whole situation sort of reminds me of Trotsky's quip about the dialectic. Neither Governor Perry nor the bulk of Texas' citizens may be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in them.
--Matthew Yglesias

The Economy

Our hearts want government to come through and save the economy. But our heads know that it's not going to happen. And that failure, in turn, is only going to further weaken institutional legitimacy across the U.S. and the world. It's a vicious cycle.
--Felix Salmon

Solidarity

The opposite of solidarity is dog-eat-dog, which, if we had to choose a motto for the last quarter century of American history, would work as well as any.
--Christopher Hayes

Beauty

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
--Franz Kafka

It's Always Something

When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death.
--J. P. Donleavy

Tweeting

Tweeting is like sex. Writing a book is like raising a child.
--Jaron Lanier

Collectively

Are you aware that human beings cannot survive on their own? What has made our success as a species is the ability to work (dare I say it?) collectively toward basic common goals. Why the fuck is this simple fact presenting such a particularly huge problem to an extremist faction of the American political spectrum?
--Northen Soul

Money

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.
--George Carlin

Water

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
--W.H. Auden

Product

If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don't know they want it yet.
--Jason Cross

Nation-State

Elite pundits increasingly seem to be making the argument that we simply can't afford to be a nation-state anymore--we can't afford to offer the most basic federal services to our poor and rural citizens. Yet they rarely consider how easily we manage to come up with unbelievable sums to remain an empire.
--Marcy Emptywheel

Obligations

It seems that we are having sometimes esoteric tiffs between Keynesians and Austrians about if and how governments should sustain jobs and growth. But, deep down, we are having a much more significant debate as we are being forced to redefine what we think about the rights and obligations of citizens and the State.
--George Magnus

Mental Illness

When are we going to recognize greed as a form of mental illness? A billionaire who wants more money is the moral and intellectual equivalent of a thousand-pound man who wants to gain weight.
--Silverback66

Fifty Percent

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
--Gore Vidal

Post-Englightenment

We live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.
--Neal Gabler

Science

We require a common culture in which science is an essential component. Otherwise we shall never see the possibilities, either for evil or good.
--C.P. Snow

Climate Change

There is extraordinarily little political will anywhere to do anything meaningful about climate change. It's time to recognize that we can't stop this train. The only thing we can do is prepare for the destination.
--Dr. Zachary Smith

Government

If you elect people who believe the government does not work, that government is always the problem, never part of the solution, they will work tirelessly to make their beliefs come true.
--Jared Bernstein

Corporations

Corporations are people, my friend....Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.
--Mitt Romney (Iowa, August 11, 2011)

Capital

The only sane conclusion is to open our eyes to the fact that finance capital is now bigger than the state. Sovereigns are limited by territory. Capital is not.
--Adam Haslett

Deny

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
--George Orwell

History

History doesn't repeat itself.

It echoes itself, it parodies itself, it shadows and foreshadows itself. Sometimes it mirrors itself, which is to say that it returns but with everything about it in reverse. It haunts itself--we can see ghosts flitting by but those ghosts have lost the power to affect life and besides they have business of their own. It resembles itself, the way grandchildren resemble their grandparents. That doesn't make them the same people though.
--Lance Mannion

Evidence-Based

As you well know there is a movement to teach and practice evidence-based medicine across the United States. Yet there seems to be no move to practice evidence-based economics.
--Meed Houston

Real Life

Money is something you should kind of watch from the corner of your eye while you live your real life.
--Laura Rowley

Twice

And here I sit so patiently,
waiting to find out what price
you have to pay to get out of
going though all these things twice.
--Bob Dylan

Advice

Milton Friedman believes that during a crisis, we only have a brief window of opportunity before society slips back into the "tyranny of the status quo," and that we need to use this opportunity or lose it. This is actually sound advice.
--Anders Behring Breivik

Organized

We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Not Knowing

I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
--Richard Feynman

Rate Us

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
—William Faulkner

Zero

Black holes are where God divided by zero.
--Steven Wright

Default

It will be very hard to spend less if the government doesn't raise the debt ceiling. The United States will be in default, and it will have to spend more, since interest rates rise as creditworthiness falls...just to make up for that.
--Nick Paumgarten

Don't Want

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
--Oscar Wilde

Dream

Nothing happens unless first a dream.
--Carl Sandburg

Politicians Lie

Meanwhile, the one reverberating litany we hear over and over again is, "politicians lie." All politicians lie. Both sides lie.

So, I offer this question: Who benefits from the belief that "all politicians" or "all news media" lie?

The answer: Those who do the most lying. The pervasive belief that all politicians lie, that both sides lie, becomes a convenient cover for those whose strategy is to spread disinformation, and use that disinformation to stir up fear and anger.
--Swami Beyondananda (aka Steve Bhaerman)

See In Him

She's one of those women who seems unaware that everyone must constantly be asking, "What does she see in him?" That women persist in seeing things in us, as men we must be grateful.
--Roger Ebert

Society

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Multitask

If you multitask constantly, your actual mental circuitry erodes, and your brain loses its ability to focus.
--Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

Global

A global market economy requires a global ethic.
--Hans Küng

Perpetually

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
--James A. Baldwin

Look Out

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Party person, and says, "Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."
--Pathman25

1 Percent

The top 1 percent [of income earners] have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
--Joseph Stiglitz

Patient

We want solutions and resolutions, and we want them quickly, but there are several benefits to being patient with contradictions and paradoxes.
--Thomas Moore

Excess

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
--W. Somerset Maugham

Forget

People change and forget to tell each other.
--Lillian Hellman

Joke

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
--George Orwell

Ignore

Perhaps as a result of a psychological coping mechanism, as a group, doctors tend to ignore what they can't fix.
--Alex Lickerman, M.D.

The End

The end may justify the means, but the end in its turn needs to be justified.
--Leon Trotsky

Uncool

Anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.
--Jonathan Franzen

Theology

I'm less bothered that fundamentalists are religious than that their religion lacks any real theological system. Theology offers a rich, if often biased language in which to carry on ethical and philosophical debate. In short, it's the rationalism possible within religion. But evangelical fundamentalism doesn't admit ethical or philosophical debate.
--Joe Propinka

Souls

And the thing about souls is that they yearn for connection with other souls.
--Lance Mannion

Strike Up

How often do you go to communal spaces only to see people trapped on their phones, Twittering and texting with people that aren't there? I genuinely think people want to be around and maybe even strike up a conversation with other people, but they don't know how.
--Brett Martin

Silicone

As my friend Russ Meyer complained in the early days of silicone, "It misses the whole principle of the matter."
--Roger Ebert

Create Gods

What led humans to create gods was not simply fear but a desire to harness and account for those sustaining moments when we receive our lives most abundantly.
--Giles Harvey

Wrong

We are never right. We can only be sure that we are wrong.
--Richard P. Feynman

Frolic

The dog was created specially for children. He is the god of frolic.
--Henry Ward Beecher

Give In

When your intuitive sense overwhelms your critical voice, you have to give in.
--Cory Arcangel

Finally

I will finally get to the bottom of myself.
--Thomas Pletzinger

Always Specific

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart's revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific.
--Jonathan Franzen

Hero

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
--Umberto Eco

Language

All language is but a poor translation.
--Franz Kafka

Your One

Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
--Mary Oliver

Be Present

Simply to be present is to comfort.
--Judith April

Triumph

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over Communism; in this country, capitalism over democracy.
--Fran Lebowitz

Journey

You don't have the answers. Neither do I. That's the point. That's why you start doing things you're not sure why you're doing: because your time has come to set out on a journey.
--Cary Tennis

Remembered

But wouldn't we all want to be remembered for making countless people's days brighter?
--Joe Posnanski (column about Harmon Killebrew, May 16, 2011)

Easy

Beware the easy griefs that fool and fuel nothing.
--Gwendolyn Brooks

More Alike

The three religions of the book--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--can all be divided between Fundamentalists (the letter of the law) and Progressives (the spirit of the law). In that sense, Jews, Christians and Muslims are more alike on either side of that divide.
--Pam Wings

True

The true New Yorker is someone with the secret belief that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
--John Updike

What The...

There are days when only an "Excuse me, what the fuck?" will do.
--Stephanie Zacharek

Contact

It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.
--Pope Benedict XVI

True Collective

A.A., uniquely among organizations in America, has successfully resisted the usual commercialization that is the fate of every other successful movement in America. A.A. works in part because nobody makes money on it. It is the true collective.
--Jack Hanover

As Far As I

She plays an astrophysicist named Jane, and, as far as I could tell, does all her own astrophysics without the aid of a double.
--A. O. Scott

Famous

When famous people go to sleep at night, it's us they dream of...The famous ones--they're the real people. We're the creatures of their dreams.
--John Guare

Create It

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
--Franz Kafka

Guaranteed

Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed.
--Glenn Greenwald

Collapse

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling--their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
--Arundhati Roy

A Theory

Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life.
--W.E.B. DuBois

Disgraced

He who dies rich dies disgraced.
--Andrew Carnegie

Steal

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
--Jim Jarmusch

Wanting Things

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
--Franz Kafka

Data Points

One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self.
--David Carr

No Feeling Is Final

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Third Act

There's a moment when people know--whatever their skills are at denial--that they have passed from what they can delude themselves into thinking is middle age to something that you could call the third act.
--Nora Ephron

Longevity

The best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness--the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person...somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.
--Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin (The Longevity Project)

Remembering

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
--Steve Jobs

Every Spirit

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.
--Marilynne Robinson

Proof

You could stare at the ocean for a lifetime and see the hard edge at its terminal point and then one day the edge is gone and in its place is a curve--sudden, inexplicable proof of infinity. Perhaps we would one day see death that way, too.
--Scott Spencer

The Rich Get...

For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate fell from almost 30% in 1995 to just under 17% in 2007, according to the IRS. And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1% of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29% to 23% in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.
--Jesse Drucker (Bloomberg Businessweek, April 7, 2011)

Talent

I have this theory about talent. It's not a fully-formed theory...but it's something I have been thinking about ever since I was a little kid. My theory is that "talent," in a way, is the capacity to make time repeat.
--Joe Posnanski

God

To say definitively that God didn't exist seemed as restrictive as saying that he did.
--Maggie Flynn

No Right

If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.
--Justice Antonin Scalia

Totality

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WILL...ATONE!
--Paddy Chayefsky

Our Bodies

Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.
--William Shakespeare

Government

There is no such entity as "The Government." Governments are simply arrangements people have agreed to in order to provide themselves with goods and services they can't provide for themselves individually and on their own.
--Lance Mannion

Good Sense

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.
--René Descartes

Jackie

Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place. Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did.
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Your Heart

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
--A. Bartlett Giamatti (former commissioner of baseball)

Take Care

I'm about community. If you do things right, if you look at the long term, if you're fair, you don't have to look at the bottom line every two seconds. That'll take care of itself.
--Greg O'Connell (developer, Mount Morris NY)

Present Future

For the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future.
--John Maynard Keynes

Look To...

If you desire to know where your spiritual work lies, look to your emotional pain.
--Alan Cohen

Right Wrong

Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.
--William Penn

Long

Je n'ai fait cell-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
(I have only made this so long because I did not have the time to make it shorter.)
--Blaise Pascal

Stellar Fire

A stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.
--Jonathan Schell

Not Looking

The greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them.
--Johann von Goethe

E-Mail

We don't know how many e-mails puts a person over the edge, but clearly at some point, it no longer leads to greater productivity.
--Adam Cox

River

Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Climate Change

Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls "protective cognition"--we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment.
--Thomas Homer-Dixon

Difficult

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
--Upton Sinclair

Merely

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
--Henrich Heine

Resentment

Having resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
--Malachy McCourt

Escaping

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
--John Maynard Keynes

Nothing's Lost

Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
--Tony Kushner

Sitcom

I live in a sitcom that nobody would watch.
--Joe Posnanski

Work

Work only starts when the fear of doing nothing finally exceeds the fear of doing something badly.
--Alain de Botton

Duty

Duty is not a particularly pleasant concept to me--not because it can be physically difficult, but because it is often empty of true feeling.
--Elizabeth Fuller

Little Bit Crazy

I think conservatives have gotten so much air time for the same reason that Charlie Sheen has. People will tune in to watch something edgy, dangerous, and a little bit crazy.
--Gemli Boston

Both Kinds

There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person.
--Hilary Mantel

Wealth and Morality

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.
--John Maynard Keynes

Awakes

The dreamer awakes, not from a body but to a body. Not an ascent from body to spirit, but the descent of spirit to body.
--Norman O. Brown

Class

Like FDR, Obama is a traitor to his class: the difference being of course that Roosevelt hailed from the Dutchess County ruling class while our current President has managed to betray the broad middle class of his rather more humble origin.
--Frunobulax Chicago

Consumers

It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want.
--Steve Jobs

Broken Fixed

Here in America, we have a deeply divided body politic. Half the population believes our election system is broken. The other half believes it is fixed.
--Swami Beyondananda (aka Steve Bhaerman)

Outcomes

There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.
--Enrico Fermi

Sane Purposes

Religion traffics in ideas that are intrinsically divisive, intrinsically insensitive to the actual details of human and animal suffering, and in many cases purposed toward an afterlife that doesn't exist. That combination of traits leads to a kind of callous disregard for the sane purposes that we would otherwise form for collaboration in this world.
--Sam Harris

New Is Old

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ours

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children....To them, "mine" is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as "ours."
--Wendell Berry

Authority

I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it.
--George Carlin

Can't Spend

Growing inequality in most countries of the world has meant that money has gone from those who would spend it to those who are so well off that, try as they might, they can't spend it all.
--Joseph Stiglitz

Some Kiss

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, 
the touch of spirit on the body.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Is To...

Packing is to traveling as rain is to rainbows as childbirth is to having a child.
--Joy Pecknold

Breaking

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
--Stanley Kunitz

Free

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.
--Tony Kushner

People

People have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It's decreed the people rule.
--Patti Smith

Impossible

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
--John F. Kennedy

What The Hell

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
--Cynthia Heimel

Wonderment

Often people will express wonderment that I don't drink, as if drinking were a necessary activity, like breathing or eating.
--Susan Cheever

An Insult

The Romantic individualism of the modern world where to be "just like other people" is typically understood as an insult.
--Alain de Botton

Living Being

I think the earth is a living being. I keep waiting for it to rear up and scrape us all off its back.
--Tom Waits

Whole

Because the soul is progressive, it never repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soup

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
--Abraham Maslow

Forward

The world only spins forward.
--Tony Kushner

Ever Became

No mirror ever became iron again;
No bread ever became wheat;
No ripened grape ever became sour fruit.
Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse.
Become the light.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Cannot Return

He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
--Hilary Mantel

Final Word

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ground

The task of this generation is to promote the very slow and often insensible progress by which good is gradually being ground from evil.
--John Stuart Mill

The Sake Of...

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men--above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
--Albert Einstein

Only Seven

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
--Robert Bly

Words

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
--Hilary Mantel

Consequences

We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they've gotta realize there's consequences to that action.
--Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), March 2010

A Tree

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
--John Stuart Mill

Moving Toward

One of the gateways to true adulthood is when we finally understand that even as we live, we are moving toward death.
--Dana Jennings

The Internet

It's hard not to think "death drive" every time I go on the Internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the Internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember.
--Alice Gregory

Serve the Banks

My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.
--Spencer Bachus (new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee)

Clear

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.
--Friday Night Lights