Enlightening

I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase "politically correct" wherever we could with "treating other people with respect," and it made me smile. You should try it. It's peculiarly enlightening.
--Neil Gaiman

Back In The Church

Religion is hurting our species, it's hurting the entire world, and yet we protect it. We need to put religion in its place, which is back in the church.
--David Silverman

Know Nothing

The only thing that we can know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human reason.
--Leo Tolstoy

Suddenly

How can a seventeen-year-old like me suddenly be eighty-one?
--Lewis Wolpert

Face Today

We face today a world filled with suspicion and hatred.
--Eleanor Roosevelt (1938)

Time

Maybe time is just an unavoidable experiential illusion....We are only able to see one thing at a time in the same way that we are unable to see through walls.
--Luc Sante

Equal

All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.
--George Orwell

Your Company

Now is the time for your loving, dear,
And the time for your company.
Now when the light of reason fails,
And fires burn on the sea.
Now in this age of confusion,
I have need for your company.
--Richard Farina

Humanize

I can't think of another way to imagine how we're going to get out of the crisis of racial hatred if it's not through the will to humanize.
--bell hooks

Dehumanize

Trump is not for me. But comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and his supporters to Nazis, inflames the wrong passions. If you dehumanize Trump's supporters, then you are just increasing the divisions in our country.
--Timothy Bal

Humor

We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.
--bell hooks

Passive

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
--Herman Melville

Wrong

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
--H. L. Mencken

Free-Range

The digital age has brought in free-range history.
--Jim Dwyer

Crime

Wherever the law is, crime can be found.
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Unthethered

Over time, the American dream has become increasingly untethered from American reality.
--James Surowiecki

Liberty

In evaluating an asserted right to be free from particular gun-control regulations, liberty is on both sides of the equation. Guns may be useful for self-defense, as well as for hunting and sport, but they also have a unique potential to facilitate death and destruction and thereby to destabilize ordered liberty. Your interest in keeping and bearing a certain firearm may diminish my interest in being and feeling safe from armed violence.
--Justice John Paul Stevens

Death & Life

No matter how much you love something, it is impossible to hold it so tightly that death cannot slip it from your grasp. But you can hold on so tightly that life cannot get through.
--Suzanne Clothier

Culture

Culture, they say, is a two-way street.
--Langston Hughes

Comprehensible

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
--Albert Einstein

Welcomed

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
--Jesus Christ (Matthew 25:35)

Vulnerability

Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
--Brené Brown

Very Little

Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.
--Marcus Aurelius

Neutrality

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.
--Dante Alighieri

Reflex

The Western powers are not threatened by terrorists. The Western powers are threatened by their response to terrorism. It is a reflex we cannot indulge in, similar to oversteering a car in a skid. It is our natural inclination that is catastrophically wrong.
--Joseph Huben

You Have Lost

I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. You want it, but to respond to hatred with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You would like me to be scared, for me to look at my fellow citizens with a suspicious eye, for me to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You have lost.
--Antoine Leiris (a journalist at the French radio network France Bleu, whose wife, Hélène Muyal, was murdered at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris)

Dehumanize

When we draw the line between those near and far, and those who look like us and those who don't, those whose names we can easily pronounce and those which we cannot, we participate in the same kind of dehumanizing that allows people to do such awful things to each other in the first place.
--Michel Martin

Hurt

Hurt people hurt people.
--Arno Michaelis

Curious

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
--Albert Einstein

Walking

Paths are made by walking.
--Franz Kafka

Ingrained

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
--Meghan O'Rourke

In Bed

Never trust anyone who lusts to go to war. They may invoke God's name, but they're surely in bed with the Devil.
--Matthew Carnicelli

We

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together.
--John Lennon

Rational

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
--Bertrand Russell

Message

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.
--Pema Chödrön

Sheer

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
--Oscar Wilde

Cynic

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
--George Mitchell

Luddite

For the thinking Luddite, technology becomes a serious threat only to the extent that it threatens to collapse the boundary between human and machine.
--David Auerbach

Alive

And the world. It's so...lovely. I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.
--Stephen Colbert

Science, Art

There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.
--Vladimir Nabokov

Simple

Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.
--Alexis de Tocqueville

Vacation

Everyone needs to take a vacation from the sort of automatic things you do...basically those things that keep you from doing the better things you need to do.
--Bill Murray

Sweeter

I'm glad that I got a chance to experience some of the misery with them along this road, because that champagne tastes a lot sweeter having gone through that.
--David Wright

Want

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
--Milan Kundera

We Are

Certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
--Virginia Woolf

Music

Music should never be harmless.
--Robbie Robertson

Not Hear

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Mistake

Without music life would be a mistake.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Inexpressible

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
--Aldous Huxley

Here

Our universe is what it is simply because we are here.
--Alan Lightman

Whole Truth

Tell the whole truth. Don't be lazy, don't be afraid. Close the critic out when you are drafting something new. Take chances in the interest of clarity of emotion.
--Jane Kenyon

Particulars

A large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep.
--William James

Mets

Take a moment to thank the Lord that social media did not exist during your playing career. The entire '86 Mets team probably would have been locked up.
--Doc Gooden

Connecting

I believe that there is something connecting us--something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness.
--Dani Shapiro

Our Time

Declining to describe our lives as unified stories is the only way we can hope to live out our time other than as tragedy.
--Helen Small

Vulnerability

The digital age has emerged out of our biggest vulnerability--to mindlessly consume until we're saturated and numb and even more mindless.
--Jennifer Stewart

Rules

Religions have no morals. They have rules.
--Duke Raul

Beauty

Beauty always has rules. It's a game.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Choice

Those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned.
--Adam Gopnick

Distraction

Life today is a battle against distraction. You start off intent on doing one thing and end up doing another. Or not doing anything at all.
--Roger Cohen

Three Sides

If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
--Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Commands

Time doesn't obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.
--Meghan O'Rourke

Nothingness

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
--John Updike

Pretensions

What a civilization this is! Naive gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds and thousands. Their moral pretensions are credulously accepted at full value.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

Afterward

Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
--Rebecca Solnit

Immigrant

As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families.
--Pope Francis (September 23, 2015)

Soul

One can't write directly about the soul.
--Virginia Woolf

Silence

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
--Susan Sontag

Volunteers

At every moment, we are volunteers.
--Stephen Colbert

Selfie

Running for president is the new selfie.
--James Gleick

Goodness

It is essential that we be convinced of the goodness of human nature, and we must act as though people are good.
--John Cage

The Animal

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
--Henry Beston

City

I believe in the city. I have to. I live on a planet where the rise in urbanity requires all of us to master the multicultural beast that is the city.
--David Simon

Emergency

We have a slowing developing emergency, a possibility to use our skills and intelligence and humanity to grow into taking care of things. Or we can go on distracting ourselves with ever more marketing and consumption and all go together.
--Susan Anderson

Dare

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
--James Baldwin

Soul and Body

I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Mets

The whole world likes the Yankees. But the real New Yorker likes the Mets.
--Jasmine Lee

Face To Face

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.
--E. M. Forster

Opinion, Perspective

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
--Marcus Aurelius

Replaced

Object impermanence, the flow of time. Everything you see will be replaced.
--Rich Cohen

Sissy

You Christians are the biggest sissies of all. You have bullied, persecuted, demeaned, lied about and did everything in your power to destroy gay lives for decades. And now they're fighting back--not to hurt you but to gain their equal status as citizens. And you sissy Christians are all like, "No fair! You're hurting ME by not bending over and taking my assault! It's an attack! Now I have to bake a cake or issue a marriage license! I'm too weak for this. Whaa! Whaa!"
--James Gregory

Sentient Being

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
--Oliver Sacks

A Man

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man."
--William Shakespeare

Existed

Was the bicycle invented or discovered? It's such a pure concept, it seems like it existed in the universe even before people thought of it, like the wheel itself, or a prime number.
--Andy Ruina (professor of mechanical engineering, Cornell University)

Solidarity

Placing an exclusive stress on the expansion of rights and freedoms of individuals by disregarding or underrating the concomitant rise of individual responsibilities brings about social pathologies. They undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.
--Nikolai Genov (sociologist)

Happen

In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
--Rudi Dornbusch (German economist)

For Us

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
--T. S. Eliot

Change

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
--Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Try Something

The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt

Uncomfortable

I'm a very uncomfortable person. I really like people, and I also don't always know what to do with them.
--Stephen Colbert

Broken

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
--Tennessee Williams

Mistake

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.
--John Gray

Cut Up

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
--C.S. Lewis

Rich

When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"
--Don Marquis

Fundamentalism

I am not actively hostile to religion except to religious fundamentalism, which is both evil and ignorant.
--Jimbo Seattle

Revenge

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
--Marcus Aurelius

Capable

We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.
--Pema Chödrön

Fleeting

Truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Homage

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
--François, Duc de La Rouchefoucauld

Like Anything Else

Like anything else, you do it long enough, you will take it for granted, or there will be aspects of it that are grinding.
--Jon Stewart

Maybe

Do you have any idea what year it is? Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950's or the 1890's? Should we call for a doctor? Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women's health care centers. You know, on second thought, maybe I shouldn't be that surprised.
--Senator Elizabeth Warren (speech on the Senate floor, August 3, 2015)

Pacified

Infrastructure crumbles, wealth flies upward, and we are pacified and distracted by lots of media.
--Portia Massachusetts

Trash

When you wonder why you don't feel good about the cultural stuff--well, it's because you are consuming trash. It's actually not designed to make you feel good. It's designed to addict you. It's designed to keep you clicking on those links--that one leads to another fun list, like "10 major talk-show fails."
--Jason Segel

Normal

Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing.
--Rosa Parks

Stranger

At times in the past decade and a half I have felt like a stranger in my own country.
--Adrienne Rich

Mystery

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
--Anaïs Nin

Be Present

Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present.
--Joanna Macy

Horrify

That the phrase "latest shooting" exists should HORRIFY us. But we've become used to it. Which is...horrifying.
--Patton Oswalt (tweet on May 24, 2014)

Deceived

The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. (Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.)
--Petronius

Scientific

It is possible that the scientific character of mind is by its nature childish, capable through life of a child's wonder and excitements, but lacking real discernment, lacking sadness, too easily delighted by its own intellect.
--E. L. Doctorow

Impossible

I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God; I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God--an ordinary God of religion--a consistent possibility?
--Richard P. Feynman

Task

Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.
--Galway Kinnell

Faith

In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
--Elizabeth Alexander

Differ

I do not know how far I differ from other people.
--Virginia Woolf

Companionship

Human companionship is magic in its own right.
--Anna Badkhen

Belong

Part of the definition of home being a place you don't belong anymore.
--Tim Kreider

Real

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
--Thomas Merton

Purpose

Does every song need a guitar solo? Absolutely. Without question. What's my purpose on Earth if I'm not playing solos?
--Richard Thompson

Think

What are we "doing" when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?
--Hannah Arendt

Separation

There can never be too much separation between church and state.
--Alan D. Haigh

Cake

From the highest of this nation's perches, in the most authoritative of this nation's voices, a majority of justices told a minority of Americans that they're normal and that they belong--fully, joyously and with cake.
--Frank Bruni

Murder

You don't see murder on this kind of scale with this kind of frequency in any other advanced nation on Earth.
--Barack Obama

Perfect Ending

I wanted a perfect ending....Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end....delicious ambiguity.
--Gilda Radner

Honesty

Part of the problem why we continue to visit these moments is because there is of a lack of honesty about how we got here. Racism, bigotry, prejudice and hatred are elements woven into the fabric of this country. There can be no healing in this land if we are not honest about who we are.
--Rev. Michael A. Walrond Jr. (the pastor at First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem, June 21 2015)

Trauma

Trauma never goes away completely. It changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. What makes you think you should be completely over it? I don't think it works that way.
--Mark Epstein

Fear, Desire

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
--Seneca

Bearable

Everyone is ultimately alone, although the shared understanding of that isolation makes life bearable.
--Stephen Holden

Spirits

I enjoy reading about unbridled high spirits but prefer to keep my bridle on.
--Garrison Keillor

Nuance

The language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.
--Rebecca Solnit

Freedom From...

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.
--Pico Iyer

Long Time

It takes a long time to understand nothing.
--Edward Dahlberg

Harm

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
--Mark Twain

Others

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
--Virginia Woolf

Nothing More

One can appreciate and celebrate each moment--there's nothing more sacred. There's nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there's nothing more!
--Pema Chödrön

Forget

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
--Aldous Huxley

Any Language

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
--Pablo Neruda (Keeping Quiet)

Innocence

Loyalty, unfailing love, instant forgiveness, a humble sense of his place in the scheme of things, a sense of wonder--these and other virtues of a dog arise from his innocence. The first step toward greater joy is to stop fleeing from innocence, begin retreating from cynicism and nihilism, and embrace once more the truth that life is mysterious and that it daily offers meaningful wonders for our consideration.
--Dean Koontz

Fashion

We live in an age in which ideas, important ideas, are worn like articles of fashion--and for precisely the same reason articles of fashion are worn, which is to make the wearer look better and to feel à la mode.
--Tom Wolfe

Don't Care

I don't care what you think about me. I don't think about you at all.
--Coco Chanel

Surprising

One of the most surprising things about getting older is how unresolved and unsure one continues to feel.
--Alain de Botton

Understand

If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.
--Carl Sagan

Sweat and Strain

And how else should an angel land on earth but with utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain...and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst.
--Tony Kushner

Responding

Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.
--Mark Strand

Reinforcement

Love is the use of positive reinforcement.
--B.F. Skinner

If You Are

If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
--Lao Tzu

Notion

I hate the notion that celebrities deserve to be treated with some kind of deference.
--David Letterman

Stupid Things

There is a lot of fear and dysfunction infused into the popular culture by the media industrial complex. They pick up on the insecurities we are all born with and combine it with the "monkey-see-monkey-do" psychology we are all vulnerable to and make us do stupid things because "everyone else is doing it."
--Sekhar Sundaram

Over

I've learned to trust people when they say it's over. They don't want to say it. So it's usually the truth.
--Matthew Weiner

A Little Healthier

What are we here for if not to enjoy life eternal, solve what problems we can, give light, peace and joy to our fellow-man, and leave this dear fucked-up planet a little healthier than when we were born.
--Henry Miller

The Universe

If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.
--Milton Glaser

Digital Feudalism

We live in a world of Digital Feudalism, The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.
--Anthony De Rosa

Worry

Sociologists sometimes call the management of familial duties "worry work," and the person who does it the "designated worrier," because you need large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of it all.
--Judith Shulevitz

Desire

Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
--Thomas Merton

Character

Sports doesn't build character. Sports reveals character.
--Heywood Hale Broun

Get Out

You always want to get out a year early, not one or two years too late.
--Dr. Bill Simmons

Regularly

The grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.
--Rebecca Solnit

Gangs

Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.
--St. Augustine

Privilege

Being able to turn a blind eye to things that don't happen to you is the essence of privilege.
--Cera Byer

Slaves

We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.
--Edward R. Murrow

Personally

If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally.
--Brené Brown

Terrible

We are terrible animals. And I think our planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us and should.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Instinct

Instinct is really accumulated experience.
--Nate Silver

Together, Apart

We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
--Pema Chödrön

Take What's Left

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.
--Marcus Aurelius

The Sun

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.
--Virginia Woolf

Thoughts

Once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them--how to think freely at all--and ideas perish at conception.
--George Packer

Wisdom

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
--E.O. Wilson

Speed

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
--Aldous Huxley

Surrender

The South surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.
--Albion Winegar Tourgée

Paradox

All truth is a paradox.
--Anne Lamott

Liberty

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.
--Abraham Lincoln

Citizens

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
--Abraham Lincoln

Aim Above

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
--Henry David Thoreau

Schedule

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
--Annie Dillard

Understand

The great advantages of a mutual language and a shared culture fail us daily in our efforts to understand our own kind.
--Dean Koontz

Neighbor

Christians would all say "love your neighbor as yourself." They just can't agree on what love entails and who your neighbor is.
--Serene Jones (president of Union Theological Seminary)

Fates

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil.
--William James

Blessed

I am comforted by the fact that the Supreme Court has blessed corporations with souls: Now they may be damned.
--Tom Bpston

A Fool

Making a fool of yourself for love is ultimately about you, how much you have to give and the distances you will travel to keep your heart wide open when everything around you makes you feel like slamming it shut and soldering it closed.
--Veronica Chambers

Dogma

All the ideologies and religions have their own answers for the big questions, but these are usually bound as a dogma to some kind of tribe. Religions in particular feature supernatural elements that other tribes--other faiths--cannot accept.
--E. O. Wilson

Battles

Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real.
--Mary Oliver

Apathetic

I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.
--Sacha Baron Cohen

Useless

Fear is a useless emotion. It prevents everything from happening. It's like closing every door and every window to your opportunity for surpassing anything in existence.
--Melody Gardot

Be Bold

But you know what? Nothing is sure in this world. If you're going to be bold for anything, be bold for love.
--Tommy Tomlinson

The Doorstep

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
--Thomas Merton

Don't Wish

And everything that's good right now,
Well, I don't wish for it to last.
--Beth Orton

Questioning

An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.
--Garry Wills

Silence

Just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.
--Matthew B. Crawford

Sampling

If you don't believe in sampling theory, next time you go to the doctor and he wants to take a little blood, tell him to take it all.
--Gian Fulgoni

Temptation

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
--Thomas Merton

Voluntary

Another article stating that "Tea Party" types or Republicans are anti-comunitarian. This is not true. We simply want our "community" to be our family, our church, our clubs, our neighbors--voluntary associations. Not the forced community of the state.
--Stephen Connecticut

Denying

No matter what we do--if white people keep, for the most part, seeing this as a black person's problem and see black people as the problem, all while denying race has anything to do with it, nothing is going to change.
--Peter Mosley

Somewhat

I have seen people change. They are not born again but they change, somewhat.
--Amos Oz

Sane

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
--Donald Wood Winnicott

Wonder

Secular people don't believe in anything supernatural, but that doesn't render us sterile souls. But because religion has constructed the language with which we describe existential wonder, it is almost like that is not our territory. But it most certainly is.
--Phil Zuckerman

Teacher

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
--Pema Chödrön

Now

Selma is not just about commemorating the past. Selma is now.
--President Barack Obama

Respectful

It's possible to disagree and remain respectful, and even to love and admire the people with whom you disagree. This is not pollyanna pie-in-the-sky naivete. It's a basic human reality.
--Michael Schur

Quality

You should always pay attention to quality. A coffin, for instance, should last a lifetime.
--Kurt Tucholsky

Knowledge

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
--Samuel Johnson

Reverence

This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it. And it's meant to be that way, do y'know. And there's where our reverence should come in.
--Henry Miller

Tribe

Every tribe, no matter how generous, benign, loving, and charitable, nonetheless looks down on all other tribes.
--E. O. Wilson

Live Long and Prosper

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP
--Leonard Nimoy (his last post on Twitter)

Side Effects

If technology is a drug--and it does feel like a drug--then what, precisely, are the side effects?
--Charlie Brooker

Anecdotes

Be careful around anecdotes; they are the black ice of reality.
--Jim Dwyer

Belonging

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
--Mary Oliver

Feelings

There's no use in comparing one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the direction of change to show itself.
--Lewis Carroll

Joy

All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
--Śantideva

Magical

What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs, and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car, and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you'd think that's pretty magical, right?
--Richard Linklater

Euphemism

So much of the conversation about death is euphemism.
--Julienne Grey

Collectively

We have lost the understanding that some human needs cannot be met individually and must be met collectively.
--John R. Quinsey

Cars

Cars are terrifying, and cars are normality itself.
--Adam Gopnik

The Nest

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
--Pema Chödrön

Grateful

I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon.
--David Carr

Tact

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

Iron Law

The iron law of marriage is that you cannot be happier than your spouse.
--Alvin E. Roth (speech when receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics, December 2012)

Forces

There are forces making for happiness, and forces making for misery. We do not know which will prevail, but to act wisely we must be aware of both.
--Bertrand Russell

Attention

Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness--an empathy--was necessary if the attention was to matter.
--Mary Oliver

Obliged

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention.
--Mark Strand

Unseen

There's an undeniable unseen world that some people call God and think they know more about than other people. I try not to get hung up on the names.
--Samuel Beam

Give It Up

I'm agnostic because I'm a scientist. Being an agnostic means saying, dogmatically, that we will never be able to know, so give it up.
--E. O. Wilson

Better

You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that's okay, love is better.
--Caroline Paul

Do Not Know

Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything.
--Mary Oliver

Pageant

I have accustomed myself to accepting the fact that the Super Bowl pregame is going to be the kind of militarized patriotic pageant that would have occurred had Leni Riefenstahl immigrated to Manhattan and gone to work with Don Draper.
--Charles Pierce

Stories

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.
--Brené Brown

Injury

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
--Marcus Aurelius

Our Friend

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Snow

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.
--Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

The Hour

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
--Bob Dylan

Poverty

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
--James Baldwin

Mission

All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them.
--Frantz Fanon

Equally

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
--Edward Gibbon

Somewhere I Read

Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Organized

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
--Immanuel Kant

Separate

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
--William Adama

Improved

There's never anything new about death, to be sure, except its improved publicity.
--Roger Angell

Problem

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. And yet, being a problem is a strange experience.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Free Speech

The joy of free speech is that we're not supposed to have to cheer everything that's said.
--Matthew Yglesias

Tied Together

Everything affects everything. It's all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters.
--Mark Bittman

Condition

To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
--Karl Marx

Alive

May I be alive when I die.
--Donald Wood Winnicott

Hell Is...

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.
--Emily St. John Mandel

Changed

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
--Ursula K. Le Guin