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)