Too Short

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
--John Burroughs

Tradition

Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history's darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost.
--Adam Frank

Job

I was very careful never to take an interesting job.
If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
--Mary Oliver

Drama

Drama isn't in the event; it's in the aftermath of the event.
--Robert and Michelle King

Play Of Tolerance

The moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call "a play of tolerance," whether in science, literature, politics or religion.
--Simon Critchley

Order

I am impressed by the degree to which outer order controls inner calm.
--Gretchen Rubin

Gray

After a while, you realize that you spend most of your life in gray. Or at least if you're smart, you do.
--Rick Raemisch

Time

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption.
--Mohsin Hamid

Brand Preferences

The machine of consumerism is designed to encourage us all to believe that our preferences are significant and self-revealing; that a taste for Coke over Pepsi, or for KFC over McDonald's, means something about us; that our tastes comprise, in sum, a kind of aggregate expression of our unique selfhood.
--Eleanor Catton

Endanger Liberty

The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes--tramps and millionaires.
--The Omaha Platform of the Populist Party (1892)

Famine

The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.
--John Mitchel

Arrogant

There's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
--Doris Lessing

Rewrites

Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain.
--Nic Pizzolatto

Won't Last

There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.
--Jules Renard

Nothingness

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
--E. M. Cioran

Writing

Writing is just a kind of dress, in which ideas and words are clothed.
--Irving Finkel

Wake to sleep

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
--Theodore Roethke

Lonely Mind

Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
--John Steinbeck

Reality

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
--Samuel Johnson

Smash

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.
--W. H. Auden (1966)

War

One more reason to hate war is that it destroys Nature--the fields, the deer, the lake, the trees--and, with it, alas, the heavens, the resting place of our souls.
--Henri Cole