History

The point of history is to learn from it, not to proceed as if we were still living in it.
--Jelani Cobb

Time and Memory

Back at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory...And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.
--Wendell Berry

Failures

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded...sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
--George Saunders

Effrontery

As we read the newspapers, and we see the effrontery with which money and power carry their ends, and ride over honesty and good-meaning, morals and religion seem to become mere shrieking and impotence.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Too Young

But just before the end, even treason might be worth a try.
This country is too young to die.
--Phil Ochs

Amazing

Like most amazing things,
It's easy to miss and easy to mistake.
For when things are really great,
It just means everything's in its place.
--Aimee Mann

At Any Time

Anything can happen at any time. There is no sure thing. Everything you hold dear is at risk, everything is vulnerable. It can all slip through your fingers.
--Daniel Smith

Survive

You have to love the world to want to survive.
--Matt Zoller Seitz

Sloth

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth.
--Charles Simic

Progress

Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world's religions.
--John Gray

Created

All religions and all churches are created by human beings. They're not that different from, say, the whole legal culture or the medical culture or the scientific culture.
--Joyce Carol Oates

Found

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.
--Sidney Lanier

Uniquely

While Americans are just 5 percent of the world's population, we house almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners, making us No. 1 in something, anyway. Either we are a uniquely evil people...or we have some uniquely awful laws and social policies.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Click

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
--Jeff Hammerbacher

Attentive

Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

The Edge

It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it.
--Charlie Munger

Drool

Day 19. I have successfully conditioned my master to smile and write in his book every time I drool.
--Pavlov's Dog

Future

People give less weight to the future, but that's a brain bug.
--Peter Singer

Work

Work was traditionally seen as a curse or an obligation for which we received payment. Nonwork was viewed as an experience of freedom for which we pay but that gives us pleasure.
--Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

History

History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but--everyone insists--the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair.
--John Gray

Controversial

We know that climate change is real. We know creationism is wrong. These are no longer scientific controversies. When people call these "controversial topics," that's misleading. They are only controversial politically. And politics is not necessarily evidence-based.
--Phil Plait

Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
--Simone Weil

Cooperation

"Survival of the fittest"--a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation.
--Russell Brand

Listening

Each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future.
--Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor

Yes

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
--e. e. cummings

Technology

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Constantly

You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world.
--Joss Whedon

Lying

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Creatures

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Direction

There's no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.
--Oprah Winfrey

Data Mining

A founding principle of our jurisprudence is that you're innocent until proved guilty; data mining is based on the opposite principle.
--Reed Hundt (former chairman of the FCC)

Two Things

What I believe is that all people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: curious and kind.
--Roger Ebert

Honesty

Unalloyed honesty is the iridium of the information economy--vanishingly rare, and therefore precious.
--Tim Kreider

Yourself

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
--e. e. cummings

Memory

When you have a memory of something, you are actually having a memory of your last memory of it.
--Sarah Polley

Fart Around

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Suffering

Judgment is just a recipe for suffering: start with our dissatisfaction over how a person happens to be and mix in our desire for them to be otherwise.
--Toni Bernhard

Peace

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.
--Joss Whedon

Meaning

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
--David Foster Wallace

Wake Up

My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.
--Miles Davis

Ingredient

The active ingredient in broccoli is broccoli.
--David Katz

Stupid

If you say that money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time: You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing things you don't like doing--which is stupid!
--Alan Watts

Short and Long

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
--Pablo Neruda

Home

It all seems so very arbitrary. I applied for a job at this company because they were hiring. I took a desk at the back because it was empty. But, no matter how you get there or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift to make that place home.
--Creed Bratton

Story

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion... It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
--Margaret Atwood

Put Off

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
--Mark Twain

Amateurs

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.
--Chuck Close

Image

God created man in his own image. And man returned the favor.
--George Bernard Shaw

Perfect

Seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
--Jaron Lanier

Society

The happiness of society is the end of government.
--John Adams

Freedom

The trouble with the libertarian approach is that you have the freedom to go anywhere you want, but there aren't any roads.
--Anonymous

Writing

I've never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.
--John Updike

Pleasure

There comes a time when speaking one's mind ceases to be a moral duty, and becomes a pleasure.
--Oscar Wilde

In Search

Music is love in search of a word.
--Sidney Lanier

My Life

My salvation is to not take anything personally, except my life.
--Sister Patrice

Sense

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.
--e. e. cummings

True Measure

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.
--Philip K. Dick

Only Love

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Portrait

In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.
--Jean-Paul Satre

Heart

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
--Steve Jobs

Quietly Thinking

Like many people, I like to set aside a few hours every day, generally between 3 and 6 a.m., to lie quietly thinking about everything that could go horribly wrong with my life and all the ways in which I am negligent and reprehensible. I have spasms of panic over things I shouldn't have written, or, worse, things I should have; I regret having spent all the money and wonder where more money might ever conceivably come from; I wish I'd kissed girls I didn't, as long ago as 1985.
--Tim Kreider

Words

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.
--Philip K. Dick

Music

Remember, information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
--Frank Zappa

Spirit-Matter

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule.
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Prickling

With all soulful work, I have found that the line between knowing and not knowing looks sharp and crisp only from a distance. Up close, there is a blurring that occurs as we near that line, a knowing that is not yet a knowing but more a prickling in the soul.
--Suzanne Clothier

Fiction

Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.
--Ted Gup

False Notion

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov

Wrong City

What a Bostonian means when he or she says "They messed with the wrong city" is "You don't think this changes anything, do you?"
--Dennis Lehane

Cry

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, "You'd better cry at my memorial service."
--Roger Ebert

Anew

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
--Abraham Lincoln

Everything

Everything in life is just for a while.
--Philip K. Dick

Words

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought.
--Eric Hoffer

Children

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
--James Baldwin

Privatize

Let's privatize her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted.
--Ken Loach

Advertising

Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits.
--Jaron Lanier

Faith

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don't feel that way. "Faith" is neutral. All depends on what is believed in.
--Roger Ebert

The Difference

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.
--Philip K. Dick

Ethical Infants

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
--General Omar N. Bradley

Personal

When people say, "It's business, it's not personal," that just means it's not personal for them. It can be personal for me.
--R.A. Dickey

Privacy

Privacy is delayed gratification.
--Alessandro Acquisti

Laugh

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though.
--Eric Weiner

Perfect

We all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. There we always see the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.
--Michel de Montaigne

Fashion

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
--Larry Ellison (chairman, Oracle)

Poetry

Prose is a house, poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it.
--Anne Carson

Beautiful

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
--Alain de Botton

Heroism

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.
--Arthur Ashe

Manners

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
—William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, spoken by Philip Marlowe/Humphrey Bogart)

Pretext

Much of the world's elite understand exactly what they're doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they've despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they're doing the right thing for everyone.
--Jonathan Schwarz

Horror

We humans can't truly embrace every horror, or else we'd be submerged in a nanosecond by the unspeakable suffering that this world offers.
--Laura Pritchett

Invisible

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
--George Carlin

New Technologies

The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.
--Stephen Baker

Decently

What makes life worth living are the saints. They can be longtime friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Information

Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don't.
--Michel Serres

Enthusiasm

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
--Benjamin Disraeli

At Heart

Because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
--Anne Frank

Written Inside

The elements that compose us are derived from the birth of stars and the explosion of supernovae. These events are only the beginning of our deep connections to the universe. Written inside of us is the birth of the solar system and workings of the planet itself.
--Neil Shubin

Standard

If you get nothing else out of this, just remember one thing: There is nothing "standard." Everything is negotiable. If they tell you it's not, go find somebody else.
--Stanley Snadowsky

Believe

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
--Isaac Asimov

Its Time

You can't pull a butterfly out of its cocoon; it has to be its time.
--Dr. John Woodall

Work

Even when I do not feel like work, I sit down to it just the same. I cannot wait for inspiration.
--Igor Stravinsky