Biggest Waste

Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.
--Seneca

Become

You become what you love.
--Joanna Macy

Jewel

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.
--Alan Moore

Malware

Why won't the concept of race go away? Because far too many people still believe that race is genetic, that it is hardware. It isn't. There is no scientific validity to the way people are grouped into races. Race is software. But it has been firmly programmed into people in subtle ways from childhood. It is, therefore, firmware. And a human malware.
--Pete Germantown

Height

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.
--Robert Frost

Open

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
--E.B. White

Fringe Benefits

The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures.
--Rebecca Solnit

Dial Up

There's absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it's going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you're alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.
--Joanna Macy

Prove

The evidence is overwhelming. And that's what's so humiliating. We need to prove through demonstrations and arguments how oppressed we are to white people so they will listen, but this practice of proving that you're treated as an inferior in America--it does something to you.
--Peter Mosley

Flawed

I think deep down inside, people understand how flawed they are. I think the more benign you make somebody, the less truthful it is.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Plants Something

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
--Thomas Merton

Stories

We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money and no human rights--except in the common imagination of human beings.
--Yuval Noah Harari

Words

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
--Aldous Huxley

Superstition

Of course, racism, being a superstition, has never been contingent upon facts.
--Jelani Cobb

Race

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
--Chris Rock

Leaving Behind

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
--Rebecca Solnit

Collective

Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
--Simone Weil

Shift

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
--Tom Stoppard

Choices

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
--Thomas Merton