Influx

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
--Henry Thoreau

Short Period

Life is a short period of time in which we are alive.
--Philip Roth

Better To See

It is better to see God in everything than to try and figure it out.
--Neem Karoli Baba

To Attend

You lose half the enjoyment in life when you refuse to attend.
--Lewis Carroll

Do Not Quite

We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Real Truth

The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.
--Dale Andreatta

Shut Down

If we were to care about every person suffering on this planet, life would shut down.
--David Shore

The Majority

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Broken

Both parties understand that the current system is broken. But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It's a very complicated issue.
--House Speaker "Nancy Pelosi" via The Onion

Cannot Feel

People in a hurry cannot feel.
--Alan Watts

Equipment

Stories are equipment for living.
--Robert McKee

Telling Lies

Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random: it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.
--B. S. Johnson

The Slime

Relationships have a way of rubbing our noses in the slime of life--an experience we would rather forego, but one that offers an important exposure to our own depth.
--Thomas Moore

Frugally

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
--Alice Walker

Real Magic

Real magic doesn't come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.
--Martha Beck

For Change

We're hankering for change but haven't any notion as to where we are headed.
--Frederick Woodruff

Only Thing

Consciousness is the only thing in the world and the greatest mystery.
--Martin Amis

Morality

The political and personal morality of the West, especially in the United States, is...utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which enables confused rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals.
--Alan W. Watts

Think Before

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
--Lewis Carroll

Host

The word "host" is related through Indo-European roots to the words "hostile" and "hostage."
--Dwight Garner

Simply the Opinion

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
--Oscar Wilde

Just Guessing

Nobody knows anything. We're all just guessing.
--Kenneth Lonergan

Happiness Is...

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
--George Burns

Paradox of Death

This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.
--Todd May

Paying Attention

Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention, of deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.
--Margaret Visser

Our Responsibility

When will we begin to recognize that we can be a civilization worthy of the name only if we understand our responsibility to care for one another?
--Nathan L. Jaschik

Just Sad

Capitalism is weird. I can't tell if it's ironic, or just sad.
--Jon Stewart

Enshrined

The notion that we give criminal trials only to people who speak respectfully about America has yet to be enshrined in the Constitution.
--Dahlia Lithwick

Stories

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
--Tim O'Brien

Die Correctly

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
--Lawrence Durrell

Great Life

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.
--Lee Iacocca

Love and Charity

Love and charity share the same root word. How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggests that they cannot coexist, that they are antithetical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?
--Nick Hornby

Participation

True religion is in participation, not in dogma. Dogma is par excellence a human creation. The idea that the performance or non-performance of a particular rite will save or damn your soul is ridiculous, but is commonly accepted by people everywhere. The root--the ground of the experience--is what we desire.
--Loren Williams

Familiar Doctrine

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
--H. L. Mencken

Research

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
--Thorstein Veblen

Good Points

It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.
--Francoise Sagan

The Act of Dying

The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments.
--John Stuart Mill

Sanity

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
--David Foster Wallace

Poetry Prose

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
--Mario M. Cuomo

Advertising

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
--Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Courage

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
--Henri Matisse

Preschool

Goldman Sachs has 14 business principles, many of which could apply to a preschool. ("We stress creativity and imagination.")
--Daniel Gross

They Will End

This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good--really, really, consistently good--I have become aware that they will end.
--Judith Warner

Enlightenment

From the dawn of human consciousness, when people became aware that they were going to die and didn't like the idea, there have always been "gurus," and priests and preachers, shamans, wizards, oracles, spiritual "advisors," and self-help "experts," who've seen the quest for enlightenment and the search for heaven as a opportunity to make a fast buck.
--Lance Mannion

Rational

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.
--Amy Wallace

Realism

I've always thought sports teach realism: What you can do, what you can't, how to win, how to lose, how to deal with it.
--Gene Lyons

Evil

Bailing out corporations with billions (who then give their executives lavish bonuses) while we cannot help those in desperate need and misery--this is the epitome of evil.
--Andy Vortex

Individual

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
--Ambrose Bierce

Since the Days

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Surely Tested

Man's mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality. This can be easily and surely tested by going to church. When anything serious is being said, the congregation dozes or squirms. But if the ranter--I mean the reverend--begins some old wives' tale, everyone wakes up and strains to hear.
--Desiderus Erasmus (The Praise of Folly, circa 1668)

Reasons

The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.
--Jean Renoir

Truth

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.
--Lillian Hellman

Fragile and Forgettable

That is what fall means...It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree.
--Garrison Keillor

Hawaii

You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii.
--Michelle Obama

Pick Battles

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
--Jonathan Kozol

Unique Gift

That is the unique gift that humans have above all animals: they can share their death with each other.
--William Barrett

Doubts

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.
--Bruce Springsteen

Holding

There is no greater agony than holding an untold story inside of you.
--Maya Angelou

New Media

This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country.
--Garrison Keillor

Continuous Creation

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
--Norman O. Brown

Truly Were Ever

More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.
--Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald

Live For

Horses live to run; that's what they do. What do we live to do, the way horses live to run?... This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.
--Martha Beck

Experiment

New York City has always been an experiment in hope.
--Michele Madigan Somerville

Technology

But the people who yearn for the good old days of older technology like typewriters don't seem to realize there never were any good old days. At the same time, in looking at new technology, it never does everything that people promise it will.
--Dennis Baron

Came To Myself

In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.
--Dante Alighieri

Alternatives

For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.
--James Salter

Look Back

In stories, those who look back--Lot's wife, Orpheus and Eurydice--are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
--Tim Kreider

Happiness

It's not so easy to be leaders of the modern world with the right to the pursuit of happiness written into the constitution.
--Robert Wilson

Business Model

"You're gonna miss us when we're gone" has never been much of a business model.
--Clay Shirky

Substance

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
--Sam Brown

Community

Where is the idea of community, the idea that we sacrifice and help others? Those who oppose government conveniently forget that the community, "we the people," wrote the Constitution to "promote the general welfare."
--Ira Rosofsky

The Word

Contrary to popular belief, it's not the legs that go first, it's remembering the word for legs.
--Larry Gelbart

Grief

The world does not distinguish one grief from another. It is the temptation to believe otherwise that keeps us in chains.
--Joy Williams

Paranoid

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
--Richard Hofstadter

Share

We have to get through, and if we're really lucky, we can find somebody to get through with. To share the map.
--Ron McLarty

Alone

What's behind the civilized exteriors is a tangle of neediness, hostility and resentment, propelled by a longing to be utterly alone and a longing to never, ever be alone.
--Ben Brantley

Superior

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital.
--Abraham Lincoln

Cheese

When it comes to cheese, there's goat people, there's sheep people and there's cow people. None of them see eye to eye, and all are biased. The stereotype is sheep people like landscape; they like to see the flock on the hillside, which looks pretty, but a sheep person doesn't really like the animal itself. Goat people like the animal and make the cheese to support the animal. And cow people like heavy machinery.
--Brad Kessler

Campfire

It can be hard to remember that the present is the only campfire in the icy wastes of time.
--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Manifest

That which you manifest is before you.
--Garth Stein

Incapable

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
--Blaise Pascal

Creative

The longer we fight the creative destruction of the marketplace by resuscitating dying companies, the slower our ability to shift capital to truly creative sectors in the economy will be.
--Eliot Spitzer

Real

Everything you can imagine is real.
--Pablo Picasso

Repair

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
--John F. Kennedy

Attachments

From the moment we're born we face a troubling paradox: Life is made interesting, fun, and happy by the attachments we form, but the loss of these same attachments lies as the root cause of our worst pain in life.
--Alex Lickerman

Meet Girls

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life--so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
--M. Cartmill

Mostly

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
--Michael Pollan

Mistakes

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
--Josh Billings

Revenge

Progress is so often revenge on the past.
--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Passing Time

As far as I can tell, this is how to live--to value the passing time.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Contraption

A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
--Michael Chabon

Serious Division

I don't see any more serious division in our country than we had in the Civil War and at other times.
--Richard J. Daley

Time Wastes

I will not argue the matter. Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return--more every thing presses on--and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to the eternal separation which we are shortly to make!
--Laurence Sterne

Fragmentation

The thing about fragmentation is, it satisfies only part of the audience experience. Yes, it is exactly what you want, but it can be lonely.
--Nancy Nall

Community

If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that's part of being a community.
--Barack Obama

Vampires

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain."
--Bill Maher

Wit

There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
--Dorothy Parker

Forecasting

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Like Storms

Thoughts are themselves like storms. They go from pleasant to dark just like that, and no mastery of the science of Brownian motion is going to enable us to predict their course and dominate them.
--Justin E. H. Smith

What The Hell

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
--David Foster Wallace

Put Off

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
--Pablo Picasso

Our Job

Our job is not to protect the private health insurance industry.
--Sen. Bernie Sanders

By Art

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
--Elizabeth Bowen

Goddess

There are two goddesses in your heart. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.
--Joe Vigil

Smarter

People who write competently, never mind stylishly, are indicating by their example that they respect writing. People who respect writing are more likely to read. And readers are smarter, there I said it.
--Nancy Nall

Intimacy

That's what real intimacy is about. Sharing secrets with one another--about what's on one's mind inside and out.
--Julie Gottman

Both

It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Bubble

The real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.
--Tom Vanderbilt

Secret Identity

Honest question, from someone less conversant in the superhero genre than you might think: Do superheroes need to hide their secret identities even from...each other? I mean, did Superman and Batman hang around the Justice League and Batman would say, "You know what really bugs me? The liberal media! Like, have you read that Clark Kent guy? He's so obviously biased!" and then Superman would say "Well, what about that jerk Bruce Wayne? Inherited all that money and is he doing anything worthwhile with it? He's probably putting most of it into overseas tax dodges!" That all just seems awkward.
--Joshua Fruhlinger

Captivated

If people were as captivated by public affairs as they are by erotic ones, the economy would be very strong.
--Magdalena

Details

Attend to the details. Teach your children manners. Write cogent paragraphs. Drive carefully. And make a good potato salad, one with some crunch, maybe accompanied by a fried drumstick with crackly skin--the humble potato and the stupid chicken, ennobled by diligent cooking--and is this not the meaning of our beautiful country, to take what is common and enable it to become beautiful?
--Garrison Keillor

Never To Arrive

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
--Pico Iyer

Changes

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
--Armistead Maupin

Closer To The Sun

The sun can only be seen by the light
 of the sun. The more a man or woman knows,
 the greater the bewilderment, the closer 
to the sun the more dazzled, until a point
 is reached where one no longer is.
--Farid ud-Din Attar

Surprised

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
--Gracie Allen

Then You Read

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
--James Baldwin

Not Logical

If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality healthcare, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government--which they say can't run anything--suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical.
--Barack Obama

Leader

If in the darkness of ignorance,
you don't recognize a person's true nature,
look to see whom he has chosen for his leader.
--Rumi

Pursued

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.
--Pico Iyer

Regret

Do I regret this life? Is it, despite all our brave words, a cheat and a waste? Does it make any slight difference to the universe that we are present?
--Garrison Keillor

Ham (and Eggs)

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.
--Anonymous

Influential

You don't have to be a "person of influence" to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.
--Scott Adams

Agriculture

All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a food product that can then be turned into high-value human energy.
--Allan Nation

Emotions

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.
--Vincent Van Gogh

Rich

I call that man rich who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.
--Henry James

Bugs

If you are not a Buddhist, you think there are Buddhists and non-Buddhists, but if you are a Buddhist, you realize everyone's a Buddhist--even the bugs.
--Shunryu Suzuki

Decisions

Every decision we make in life has both a price and payoff.
--Bill Roberts

Free

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stumbling

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
--Charles F. Kettering

Wonderful

I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.
--Marilyn Monroe

Wag

Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
--Samuel Butler

Something Nice

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.
--Nancy Friday

Sociable

The sociable solitary is an easily pained but far from unusual breed; one distinguishing characteristic is that farewells are forever on the brink of being made.
--Anthony Lane

Avoid

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
--Winston Churchill

Pretend

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.
--Cary Grant

Right

Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
--Viktor E. Frankl

Rare

What would humans be without love? "Rare," said Death.
--Terry Pratchett

Thanks

I'm still an atheist, thank God.
--Luis Bunuel

Approximately

It is better to be approximately correct, than precisely wrong.
--Sam Kash Kachigan

Instincts

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war...Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
--C. S. Lewis

Gradual

Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.
--John Michael Greer

Initiations

Marriage is not unadulterated happiness, but is rather another of life's initiations.
--Thomas Moore

Can't Steer

The will is never free--it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car--it can't steer.
--Joyce Cary

Variation of Wave

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
--Albert Einstein

Movement

Learning is movement from moment to moment.
--J. Krishnamurti

Perfect Sense

To spend time with these Indiana community bankers is to step into an alternate universe, where everything sounds a little strange because it makes perfect sense. You hear things like, "If you don't understand the risk you're taking, don't take it." And, "We want to be around for decades, so we're not focused on the next quarter."
--David Segal

Serious and Studious

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
--William Butler Yeats

Dust

Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.
--Marianne Moore

J.S. Bach

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
--Dr. Lewis Thomas

Deep Impulses

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
--Bertrand Russell

What Is It Really?

This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centers of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe--perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy--and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves.
--Dennis Elwell

Seize It, Let Go Of It

Sartaj was thinking about how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.
--Vikram Chandra

Planted the Tree

When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.
--Vietnamese proverb

Bread

Bread was what you wanted over the long haul, when you got right down to it. When you got right down to it, you wouldn't want a lifetime of cake.
--Alice McDermott

The Passage

All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
--Simone Weil

Unknown Unknowns

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.
--Donald Rumsfeld

As If

It is as if happiness or unhappiness stem in large part from how we address what happens in the world, not what actually happens.
--Daniel Nettle

Stories

We often fail to honor stories.
--Cary Tennis

Being Born

He not busy being born is busy dying.
--Bob Dylan

The World Anew

If my heart could do my thinking
And my head begin to feel
I would look upon the world anew
And know what's truly real.
--Van Morrison

Capable of Living

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.
--Henry Miller

The Pauses

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes--ah, that is where the art resides.
--Artur Schnabel

From Scratch

If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
--Carl Sagan

Remind Me

Man needs more to be reminded than instructed.
--Samuel Johnson

Taxation Is Mortal

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but taxation is mortal. You come when you can and leave when you must. The show is continuous.
--Robertson Davies

Fast & Shallow

The faster our news, the shallower our history, the more frantic our panic.
--Jill Lepore

All Pleasures

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
--C. S. Lewis

Whole

Be really whole
And all things will come to you.
--Lao-Tzu

Elevates the Very Concept

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
--Edward O. Wilson

Not Penance

Environmental stewardship need not be a form of penance for past errors. And it's too late to save the planet by reverting to primitivism.
--Cary Tennis

Sharply Unexpected

We now boast genome research which makes clear that every individual is a genetic chef's salad, often with sharply unexpected contributions.
--Lionel Tiger

Then Return

At baseball's heart lies one simple goal: to leave home and then return.
--Alan Schwartz

Customs and Habits

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.
--G. K. Chesterton

The Test

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sleeping Around

Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: It's not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with. Sleeping around, to continue our metaphor, can actually be useful for large derivatives dealers because it assures them government aid if trouble hits.
--Warren Buffett

Surpass Myself

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
--Thomas Merton

Essential Condition

The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary: to see everything as though it might have a mind.
--Adam Gopnick

The Greatest Mistake

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you
will make one.
--Elbert Hubbard

No Fixed Plans

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.
--Lao Tzu

Deliberate

Silence requires not simply failing to notice something, it's a deliberate effort to refrain from noticing it.
--Eviatar Zerubavel

Denial

The most dangerous thing in any economic crisis is denial.
--Simon Johnson

Quite Insane

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
--Angela Monet

So Welcome

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
--Anne Bradstreet

Real Good

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
--Simone Weil

Barely Sketch

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
--David Foster Wallace

The Evolution

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and "consciousness" cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and "will" cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and "doing" cannot be the result of things which "happen."
--G. I. Gurdjieff

As If

Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.
--Buddhist saying

The Egg

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.
--Christina Baldwin

Desire Changes

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
--Marcel Proust

Clearly

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.
--Lynn Hall

Fill Forms

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
--Frank Bidart

Often

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
--Winston Churchill

Actor Actress

An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.
--Richard Burton

Learn How

To philosophize is to learn how to die.
--Cicero

To Be Tough

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The Word

Money is the word of the Devil.
--Martin Luther

Inhabit Time

Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
--C. S. Lewis

Solo

Life is playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
--Samuel Butler

History Lesson

Insofar as there is a lesson in history, it's that human beings are not good with large sums of money, anything over $136.
--James Grant

Not

Not always so.
--Suzuki Roshi

Teach Yourself Stuff

That's what research is: You teach yourself stuff. The true, true discovery--you've got to just do it yourself. You can't read about it.
--Daniel Nocera

Where You Are

If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.
--Wallace Stegner

Love Many

The best way to know God is to love many things.
--Vincent van Gogh

The Feeling

Maybe they even indulged the feeling that they each must have a double in some parallel universe, happily living the life they'd imagined for themselves in their youth.
--Richard Russo

It's A Shame

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
--William Faulkner

Long and Short

The days are long, but the years are short.
--Gretchen Rubin

Blind, Pitiless Indifference

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
--Charles Darwin

Good One

Whatever you are, be a good one.
--Abraham Lincoln

Adaptable

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
--Charles Darwin

Recovery

Recovery keeps people from being junkies and keeps people out of mental hospitals and keeps them from drinking and assaulting each other. But it does not explain all our pains and all our madness. In fact, I think it is the modesty of its purposes that keeps the recovery movement from slipping into cultish insanity. We resist the seductive assumption that any one system might solve everything.
--Cary Tennis

Times of Change

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer

Exists In The Mind

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.
--David Hume

Natural Speech

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.
--Tennessee Williams

To Be Lived

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
--William Butler Yeats

Keep Going

If you are going to go through hell, keep going.
--Winston Churchill

The Reverse

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the reverse.
--Soviet Union joke

Open Heart

Everybody's heart is open...when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.
--Jane Austen

Proof

The proof of gold is fire.
--Benjamin Franklin

Last Word

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
--William James

Let Go

If you're going to change the politics, you must change people's understandings of what it means to be human, to make them let go of the possessive individualism that has led to such disaster.
--Linda Hirshman

Naked

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
--C. S. Lewis

All Children

Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly.
--Various, combined

Not Give Them Up

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
--Barack Obama (first inaugural address; January 20, 2009)

Support

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt (first inaugural address; March 4, 1932)

The Arc Is Long

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not The End

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
--Winston Churchill

Meaning of Life

The meaning of life is that it ends.
--Franz Kafka

Eternal Hanging

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
--William James

Love and Pity

Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world.
--William Law

Suffer Less

I didn't become a Buddhist because I wanted to be a good meditator. I wanted to suffer less.
--Sylvia Boorstein

Prompted

All human activity is prompted by desire.
--Bertrand Russell

Yet Not Disenchanted

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
--C. S. Lewis

Sense of Fairness

Debt is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.
--Margaret Atwood

The Suspicion

According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our dissatisfaction with life derives from a depression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion that "I" am not real.
--David Loy

Same Success

My resolution is the same one every year--Get your shit together--and I suspect I'll have the same success I had last year.
--Nancy Nall