12/07/11

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. -Christopher Morley

12/06/11

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. -John Steinbeck

09/29/11

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. –Kurt Vonnegut

09/27/11

There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle--to do nothing at all. -Sydney Smith

09/22/11

Only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves. -Paul Auster

09/21/11

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. -William Faulkner

09/20/11

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together. -Jacob A. Riis

09/19/11

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. -William James

09/16/11

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong. -Neil Gaiman

09//15/11

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. -Harlan Ellison

09/14/11

I have great faith in fools--self confidence my friends call it. -Edgar Allan Poe

09/13/10

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. -Thomas Merton

09/02/11

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair? -Walker Percy

09/01/11

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. -Jean Cocteau

08/31/11

All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. -Kabir

08/15/11

The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action. -Winston Churchill

08/10/11

It's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for. -Paulo Coelho

08/09/11

Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey. -Fitzhugh Mullan

08/08/11

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple. -Rabindranath Tagore

08/04/11

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught. -Winston Churchill

08/03/11

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. -Will Durant

08/02/11

No one imagines that symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them. -Alan Watts

08/01/11

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind. -Hannah Senesh

06/28/11

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. -Bertrand Russell

06/24/11

Where I was born and where and how I lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest. -Georgia O'Keeffe

06/23/11

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. -George Lois

06/22/11

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -Howard Thurman

06/17/11

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create, or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit. -Ansel Adams

06/16/11

We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel- "Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it." You’re not as alone as you thought. -John Steinbeck

o6/15/11

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. -Lao Tzu

06/14/11

Sometimes you have to lose your mind before you come to your senses. -Dan Millman

06/13/11

Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going. -William Zinsser

06/09/11

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. -Carl Sandburg

06/08/11

May you write with joy and courage and may your words dance across the page. -Bruce Coville

06/07/11

They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. -Andy Warhol

05/09/11

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not. -Michael Pollan

05/06/11

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience. -Hyman Rickover

05/05/11

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. -Henry David Thoreau

05/04/11

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours. -Dale Carnegie

05/03/11

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. -James A. Garfield

04/30/11

I want someone to laugh with me, someone to be grave with me, someone to please me and help my discrimination with his or her own remark, and at times, no doubt, to admire my acuteness and penetration. -Robert Burns

04/27/11

Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions. -Yahia Lababidi

04/25/11

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. -Hafiz

04/22/11

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. -Jack Kerouac

04/21/11

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. -Carl Sandburg

04/20/11

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. -Jean Cocteau

04/19/11

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. -Samuel McChord Crothers

04/18/11

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. -John Keats

04/15/11

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. -Muriel Rukeyser

04/14/11

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing. -W.S. Merwin

04/13/11

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. -James Branch Cabell

04/11/11

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. -Maxwell Bodenheim

04/08/11

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. -T.S. Eliot

04/07/11

In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed. -Matsuo Basho

04/06/11

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose. -Charles Bukowski

04/05/11

Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue. -Jimmy Santiago Baca

04/04/11

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. -Oscar Wilde

04/01/11

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. -Salman Rushdie

03/31/11

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. -Aldous Huxley

03/30/11

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page. -Naomi Shihab Nye

03/29/11

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst. -Oscar Wilde

03/28/11

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out. -Rabindranath Tagore

03/25/11

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart. -Lois McMaster Bujold

03/24/11

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. -Maya Angelou

03/23/11

Let the beauty we love be what we do. -Jalaluddin Rumi

03/22/11

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience. -Henry Miller

03/21/11

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -Joseph Campbell

03/18/11

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. -James Thurber

03/16/11

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first. -Harry S. Truman

03/03/11

I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed: and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I fail and keep trying. -Tom Hopkins

02/28/11

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did. -Newt Gingrich

02/25/11

When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger. -Epictetus

02/24/11

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson

02/23/11

It's important to live in the is and not in the was. -Colin Cowherd

02/22/11

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. -Samuel Butler

02/21/11

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

02/16/11

Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use. -Earl Nightingale

02/15/11

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.” -Erich Fromm

02/14/11

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love. -Neil Gaiman

01/25/11

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

01/24/11

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. -Socrates

01/21/11

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing. -Eric Hoffer

01/19/11

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. -Gilbert Highet

01/18/11

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. -Rabindranath Tagore

01/14/11

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. -James M. Barrie

01/13/11

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned. -Peter Marshall

01/12/11

While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
-Gilda Radner

01/06/11

When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge. -Gerald Jampolsky

01/05/11

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success. -Dorothea Brande