Dreams

We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future.
--Richard Feynman (1964)

Imaginary

This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.
--Jamelle Bouie

Machines

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
--Bertrand Russell

Labor Unions

Thirty years of Reaganomics and they could never figure out that by destroying labor unions, they destroyed the middle class which was the economic engine of America.
--Humuhumunukunukuapuaa

Theory

In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time.
--National Academy of Sciences

Portals

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
--James Joyce

Crude Matter

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
--Yoda

Play

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
--Arthur C. Clarke

Promises

Little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.
--Dean Koontz

Gears

Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.
--Charles Schultz

A Book

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
--Mark Twain

Book of Spells

I remain convinced that American conservative thought is now not a philosophy but, rather, a book of spells, a series of conjuring words that have meaning only to the initiates.
--Charles P. Pierce

Metaphor

On close inspection, "depression is a chemical imbalance" turns out to be every bit as much a model, a metaphor, a story, as "depression is an excess of black bile."
--Katherine Sharpe

Priority Option

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
--Mark Twain

Pleasure

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.
--Muriel Spark

The Sum

Everything is the sum of the past...There is nothing, not even the human soul, the highest spiritual manifestation we know of, that does not come within this universal law.
--Teilhard de Chardin

He Owes

All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilisation, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
--Tom Paine

Stand In

Every variety of nationalism, in every country in the world, involves some degree of invention, imagination and amnesia, standing in for actual history.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Fix

The entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If you can fix the broken piece, everything can go right back.
--Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar

Aware

Humankind is no less than the universe having become aware of itself.
--Drew Monkman

Why

The first question which we have a right to ask will be, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
--Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)

Chant the Beauty

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cheap Fuel

Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself--it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
--Bill McKibben

His Heaven

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.
--Mark Twain

Language

Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.
--Wade Davis

Forgive

My experience is long and my memory is good, and I know that countless times, I have stood in a place diametrically opposed to the path my soul would have me take. And for this, I have had to find a way to forgive myself.
--Suzanne Clothier

33 Times

This was the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.
--Ezra Klein

Machine

I'm content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue.
--Lewis Lapham

Getting the Hell Out

It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
--Tim Kreider

Great Things

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
--Leonard Bernstein

Interpretation

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation.
--Mark Doty

Not Real Good

My story is such that I'm always kind of waiting for the next trauma around the corner. I'm not real good at celebration. I've never done it well.
--R.A. Dickey

Essence

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
--Thomas Pynchon

Hunch

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
--Lily Tomlin

False Separation

The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected.
--Nathan Jurgenson

Desperate

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?
--Henry David Thoreau

Control

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
--Mario Andretti

Nuts

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
--Franz Kafka

Italian

Secret to life, marry an Italian.
--Nora Ephron (her contribution to "Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure")

Attention

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.
--Simone Weil

Inconceivable

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.
--Andre Maurois

Find Them

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them.
--Jim Croce

Dangerous

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
--T. H. Huxley

Late Into the Universe

Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
--Richard Dawkins

Happens

Every time we say Let there be! in any form, something happens.
--Stella Terrill Mann

Something Exciting

I am still expecting something exciting, drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas.
--Edmund Wilson

New and Retro

Just as it can be good to avoid new stuff just because it's new, it's good to avoid remaining retro just for the sake of remaining retro.
--J.D. Smith

Let Love Flow

What I find so deeply moving is the animal willingness to let love flow and not block it. Never once have I seen a fat dog draw back in shame from a loving hand that offered a belly rub, nor a dog who would turn away affectionate attention because of guilt over past misdeeds.
--Suzanne Clothier

Work

Somewhere in your career your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful, and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.
--Ben Kingsley

Bravery

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
--Wendell Phillips

The Story

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it and copy it.
--Jules Renard

Comfortable

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
--Mark Twain

Minority

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
--Ralph Ellison

Survive

Our almost-instinct almost true
What will survive of us is love.
--Philip Larkin

Luck

Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck--and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
--Michael Lewis

The Opposite

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.
--Marina Keegan

Fate

To love is to give hostages to fate.
--Jo Coudert

Attention and Awareness

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
--David Foster Wallace

Digital Media

I bow to no one in my loyalty to digital media. Our household has two iPads, two Kindles, and a Nook. They are the future, and for traveling they can't be beat. But I am reminded that five centuries' worth of ergonomic advancements in laying out printed material have not been overturned in one decade. There is still something very nice about the look, feel, and impression on the eye, the senses, and the memory of a well-designed physical magazine or book.
--James Fallows

Education

Education is simply the soul of society as it passes from one generation to another.
--G. K. Chesterton

Worries

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
--Mark Twain

Irony

Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends.
--Paul Fussell

Clear

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
--Wislawa Szymborska (In Praise of Self-Deprecation)

Special Act

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
--Charles Darwin

Decisions

Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.
--Dean Koontz

Expert

Define expert as you will, but it's rarely warranted in any field by but a tiny handful.
--Suzanne Clothier

Attention

We create ourselves by how we invest the energy of our attention.
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Storm

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.
--Mark Twain

Consumer Benefit

Advertising isn't interested in political regeneration. The purpose is to nurture foolish thoughts, and the laziness of mind suckled at the silicone breasts of CBS and Disney counts as a consumer benefit.
--Lewis Lapham

Trustworthy

A liberal, free market society needs "trust in the trustworthy" as the core of its values, not just as a Quixotic moral "extra."
--Geoffrey Hosking

Swing Voters

Expect to hear complaints from the right that it's unfair for Obama to come out with positions in an election year that appeal to swing voters.
--Daniel Gross

Freedom to Marry

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
--Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority in Loving v. Virginia (1967)

Procrastination

Worry is not productive; it's a kind of procrastination.
--Tim Kreider

Capitalism

Although capitalists would prefer we think otherwise, human ingenuity created capitalism--not the other way around.
--Frank Joyce

Together

We betray so much so casually when we choose to forget about the only thing that's really worth caring about, which is the only thing we've all got, which is each other--which is all of us, all of us together or all of us lost.
--David Roth

Tenderness

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us.
--Dean Koontz

Word Work

Word-work is sublime...because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
--Toni Morrison

Distress

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.
--Karl Marx

Everybody Worships

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
--David Foster Wallace

Jealous

God is indeed a jealous God.
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.
--Emily Dickinson

Post-Literate

The post-literate sensibility is offended by anything that isn't television, views with suspicion the compound sentence, the subordinate clause, words of more than three syllables.
--Lewis Lapham

Communicate

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
--J. B. Priestley

Regeneration

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.
--George Orwell

Partially Insane

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
--Mark Twain

Old Men

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
--T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

No Meaning

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
--C.S. Lewis

Love and Death

Love is stronger than death.
--Paul Tillich

Particular

Our lessons in this lifetime are simply our struggles to smooth the flow of life through and around our particular flaws.
--Suzanne Clothier

In Death

We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women--meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices--live as if death is not a part of life but only an end.
--Dean Koontz

Emotion

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
--Mark Twain

Encourages

In marriage, when those tight times happen, when you feel, "Oh, shit, this is terrible, I'm outta here," you take it as an opportunity to learn more about each other, get closer, and enlarge your love. Then that precious feeling kind of pulls you together and encourages you in the next tough time.
--Jeff Bridges

Noise

Relationships of every kind are riddled with overinterpreted noise. How many angry exchanges are triggered by extraneous comments or fleeting looks, many of which are attributable to passing moods?
--Ted Cadsby

The Choice

The observer's choice of what he shall look for has an inescapable consequence for what he will find.
--John Archibald Wheeler (physicist)

Soul

Soul is most pregnant and ready to be born in relationships, since we can't be human without them. We cannot save our soul, much less find it, alone.
--Gary Zukav

Dread

May you dream you are dreaming, in a warm soft bed.
And may the voices inside you that fill you with dread,
Make the sound of thousands of angels instead,
Tonight where you might be laying your head.
--Patty Griffin

Hour of Death

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
--Marcel Proust

All Created Things

By means of all created things without exception, the divine assaults us, penetrates us and molds us.
--Teilhard de Chardin

Regrets

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.
--Alexander Payne

Peace

Peace isn't a place with no stress, but a place where you take the stress as it comes, in stride, and don't let it rule you. You let it flow through you, and then smile and breathe.
--Leo Babauta

Humane

The responsibility for being humane lies strictly within our own hearts; we cannot and should not depend on external authorities to guide us.  
--Suzanne Clothier