Clear

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
--W.H. Auden

New Life

It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.
--Jennifer Moxley

Empowered

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Security

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nobody

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know!
--Emily Dickinson

Question

God is a question, not an answer.
--Kamel Daoud

Same Thing

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.
--Zora Neale Hurston

Luck

Feeling one has had enough luck, more than one deserves, is perhaps the most unfamiliar and uncharted of all emotions.
--Alain de Botton

Gravy

Authenticity is the key. Once you've learned to fake that, the rest is gravy.
--Charles P. Pierce

Lie

People lie for a reason.
Like the law they make up your mind.
--Abigail Washburn

Shines Through

For old people, beauty doesn't come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Progress

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Search

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.
--Irvin D. Yalom

Superior

Discovery is always superior to invention.
--Stephen Colbert

Getting Older

You can be sure you're getting older when your finger isn't on the pulse of pop culture but you're sure it is.
--Kelly Oxford

False Notion

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov (1980)

Principles

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
--Albert Camus

Dissolve

Let the GOP split and practically dissolve and come back when it's ready to accept civil rights, voting rights, women's rights, facts and science, and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
--Rodger Lodger

Unjust

The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Daniel J. Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic "new left," articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.
--Daniel Lewis (third paragraph of obituary; New York Times; April 30, 2016)

Uncertain

From the first day I can remember, I was brought up thinking about death. It's a constant companion in our religion. Tomorrow is so uncertain.
--Vin Scully