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

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