Choice

When you have a choice to make and you don't make it, that in itself is a choice.
--William James

Paradise

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
--Jean Paul Richter

Spiritual

Calvin: Yep, Christmas is just around the corner.
Calvin: And what better way to celebrate a religious holiday than with a month of frenzied consumerism!
Hobbes: I'm surprised other religions haven't picked up on that.
Calvin: Getting loads of loot is a very spiritual experience for me.
--Bill Watterson

Dust and Rainbows

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,
Help us to see
That without the dust the rainbow
Would not be.
--Langston Hughes

Other

I am an other.
--Arthur Rimbaud

Information

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
--Herbert Simon

Hedge

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
--Tim Kreider

The Oldest Story

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
--Bill Moyers

Belongs

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
--Walt Whitman

Words

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.
--Doris Lessing

Comparison

Comparison is the death of joy.
--Mark Twain

Self-Respect

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
--Joan Didion

Progress

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
--David Simon

Altered

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
--Nelson Mandela

Choice

There is a statistical theory, degrees of freedom, that proves that every single choice you make narrows your choices (the choices you might make in the future), rendering having it all impossible.
--Delia Ephron

Trust

Sometimes it's those things we least understand that deserve our deepest trust. Isn't that what love and wonder tell us, too?
--Pico Iyer

Repetition

My rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency.
--W.G. Sebald

Attention

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
--Mary Oliver