Henri Matisse

[Henri Matisse] later described those first experiences painting as almost like a religious conversion. He said, “For the first time in my life I felt free, quiet, and alone … carried along by a power alien to my life as a normal man.”
-Writer's Almanac

Cemetery Mystery

We went for a walk on my birthday and when we rounded the Precious Blood Cemetery hill we spotted a chocolate cake on the ground with a chunk missing, probably eaten by squirrels. It had white frosting with pink decorative details and a penny and a dime stuck on the rim of the gold plate.

Today I walked through Precious Blood Cemetery again and as I was descending the hill I heard a phone ringing. It was very loud and sounded just like an old fashioned 1950's telephone. I looked around and there wasn't a living soul in sight.

The French Robots Love Me

I've noticed a lot of traffic on my blog recently. It all seems to be from France. My husband told me it could be robots reading my blog. "Really? Then the French robots must love me," I said.

Healing Soup

Yesterday we had driving rain from the Nor'easter. I made a vat of kale soup. I chopped the whole bunch of celery because it was wilting, I rinsed and chopped three heads of kale, I added a can of crushed tomatoes, I chopped a whole bulb fresh garlic and I peeled and chopped a nob of fresh ginger, then I added hot sauce, soy sauce, frozen corn niblets, some olive oil and sliced leftover smoked kielbasa sausage. It is so good.

Irvin D. Yalom

“One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Four major existential concerns—death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom—play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

Richard A. Friedman

In the end, whether or not we are more than our brain is less important and less interesting than the fact that our brain does not just give orders; it takes them, too.
Article

-Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and a contributing opinion writer.

C.S. Lewis

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

C.S. Lewis

“Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

C.S. Lewis

“The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
-C.S. Lewis, in the opening line of A Grief Observed

Inner Search

“One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.”
― Jacob Needleman

A Grieving

When I was working with troubled teens at a local art high school eight years ago, I had a profound grieving episode towards the end of the school year. I had heard the students stories for months and had contemplated their lives with compassion. I was not a trained therapist I was just a receptive artist in the community hired to help. Then one night I woke up and sat up in bed. I had coughing sobs that came from the deepest place, in my abdomen. The image that came to me was was of a snake being uncoiled from my gut. It was a waterfall of emotion which was terrifying but I trusted it. I was finally grieving my teenage traumas along with those of the students. I'll never forget it. It was healing.

Non-Judgement

“Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.”
― Deepak Chopra

Peggy O'Mara

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
― Peggy O'Mara

Inner Dialogue

“Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

Lev Golinkin

“My memory of the books stretched beyond consciousness. They were there when I first opened my eyes and began to identify things like "warm," and "house," and "bed," and while I didn't know about or understand the byzantine game of passports, imaginary relatives, summonses, and exit visas, it was the breakup of Dad's library that made leaving a reality. The books were the background of my little world, and seeing them carted away by friends and relatives was like watching someone dismantle the sky.”
― Lev Golinkin

William Shakespeare

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.
– William Shakespeare

Abraham Lincoln

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
– Abraham Lincoln

Touching Water

As long as I can touch water I can calm myself. When I was three years old my mother used to set me up to play with a bowl of soapy water. That's all I needed to amuse myself. Even now I find washing dishes enjoyable and centering.

Mary Pipher

“Prayer is vastly superior to worry. With worry, we are helpless; with prayer, we are interceding. When I hear sad news, I try to say a prayer for the victims. When I am troubled, I will say a prayer that asks for relief for myself and for all those who suffer as I do. When I am concerned about my relatives or friends I say a short prayer to myself - "May they be happy and free of suffering."
― Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World”

Mary Pipher

“Pain, as well as beauty, is necessary to give us perspective. We can place our suffering against the backdrop of time and allow our nagging little egos to rest in the great verdant container of the timeless.”
― Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World

Mary Pipher

“In Smart Girls, Gifted Women, Barbara Kerr explores the common experiences of girls who grew into strong women. She studied the adolescent years of Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maya Angelou and Beverly Sills, and she found that they had in common time by themselves, the ability to fall in love with an idea, a refusal to acknowledge gender limitations and what she called “protective coating.” None of them were popular as adolescents and most stayed separate from their peers, not by choice, but because they were rejected. Ironically, this very rejection gave them a protected space in which they could develop their uniqueness. Many strong girls have similar stories: They were socially isolated and lonely in adolescence. Smart girls are often the girls most rejected by peers. Their strength is a threat and they are punished for being different. Girls who are unattractive or who don’t worry about their appearance are scorned. This isolation is often a blessing because it allows girls to develop a strong sense of self. Girls who are isolated emerge from adolescence more independent and self- sufficient than girls who have been accepted by others.”
― Mary Pipher

A Ledge

“With meditation I found a ledge above the waterfall of my thoughts.”
― Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World

Carrot

“I'm a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I'm carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.”
― Mary Pipher

Mary Pipher

“I want to write. I have always wanted to write. I do not care it I am not good at it. I just want to try.”
― Mary Pipher

Language

“Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.”
― Mary Pipher

Mary Pipher

“I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings.

There is a Buddhist saying, "No resistance, no demons.”
― Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World

Mary Pipher

“Another vital skill is managing pain. All the craziness in the world comes from people trying to escape suffering. All mixed up behaviour comes from unprocessed pain. People drink, hit their mates and children, gamble, cut themselves with razors and even kill themselves in an attempt to escape pain. I teach girls to sit with their pain, to listen to it for messages about their lives, to acknowledge and describe it rather than to run from it. They learn to write about pain, to talk about it, to express it through exercise, art, dance or music.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Quiet

We don't need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when its quiet, surprising things happen.”
― Mary Pipher, Letters to a Young Therapist

Mary Pipher: Observe and Respect

“I teach girls certain skills. The first and most basic is centering. I recommend that they find a quiet place where they can sit alone daily for 10 to 15 minutes. I encourage them to sit in this place, relax their muscles and breathe deeply. Then they are to focus on their own thoughts and feelings about the day. They are not to judge these thoughts or feelings or even direct them, only to observe them and respect them. They have much to learn from their own internal reactions to their lives.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Telling Stories

“Telling stories never fails to produce good in the universe.”
― Mary Pipher, The Middle of Everywhere

Mary Pipher

“Good therapy, gently but firmly, moves people out of denial and compartmentalization. It helps clients to develop richer inner lives and greater self-knowledge. It teaches clients to live harmoniously with others and it enhances Existential consciousness, and allows people to take responsibility for their effects on the world at large. For me, happiness is about appreciating what one has. Practically speaking, this means lowering expectations about what is fair, possible and likely. It means, finding pleasure in the ordinary.”
― Mary Pipher, Letters to a Young Therapist

Truth

“When one of us tells the truth, he makes it easier for all of us to open our hearts to our pain and that of others.”
― Mary Pipher

Dopamine

“Via our machines— be it phone, television, or computer— we receive an enormous amount of information every day. But we don’t have the time, the energy, and the emotional resilience to deal with all of this information. We do triage as best we can, but we still are flooded with more stimulation than we can process and integrate. Still, many people are hooked. Scientists have discovered that every time we hear the blip or ding of an e-mail or text message a small amount of dopamine is released into our brains. We humans are programmed to be curious and it is natural to want to know more, more, and more. Therapists have coined a phrase for a new addiction: FOMO, or “fear of missing out.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

One day a month, we go off the grid. We wake up and make one decision at a time about what we feel like doing. We don’t take phone calls or look at our computers. We don’t pay bills or do housework. We just enjoy whatever we feel like doing in our area.
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Looking at The Sky

“What I find most sustaining is what I loved as a girl: lying down on my back and looking at the sky. That is my first memory and I hope it is my last.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“Healing the earth is not a liberal or conservative idea— it is a form of prayer.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“As we go about our troubled and sometimes frenzied lives, in this time of the Great Acceleration, we have close at hand ways we can move out of the time zone of our current century and into a transcendent experience. We can do this by simply recognizing our kinship with another living being, by finding one beautiful thing to enjoy, or by allowing ourselves to be swept away emotionally by the miraculous and intricate world we have all around us.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Multiplication of Courage

“One of our most effective coping skills is simply sticking together. In a 2011 New Yorker article called “Social Animal,” David Brooks writes, “Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection . . . Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Working together, we were experiencing what Nelson Mandela called “the multiplication of courage.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

When people come together, they can accomplish more than they can by individual actions. With this transformation from “me” to “we,” the wind picks up, the sails fill, and the boat is off. . .
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Coalition members learned to make our points via stories. It is impossible to argue with a story that simply reflects the experience of the storyteller. People like stories and remember them. They create emotions that are essential to motivation and action. Emotions, not facts, are what energize humans to act. Our best stories were about our own inconsistencies and failings or about our own emotional struggles with the issue.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“This bittersweet phenomenon of a successful event paired with no discernible political gain seemed to be a chronic problem for our group. However, we were experiencing a victory that could not be taken away from us. That is, we were by now a transcendent, connected community. We were learning that relationships always trump agendas, and that a good process is sustaining, regardless of outcome.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“I do it for the relationships. I like to spend my time with people who are trying to make the world a fairer, kinder place. I’ve been in groups like this since college, and they have made me happy.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“The cure for the pain is the pain. Unprocessed pain almost always leads to something much worse than pain. Opening ourselves up to our emotional reactions to that world and allowing ourselves to feel the gamut of emotions that opening inevitably produces is the beginning of a movement toward wholeness and healing. This can produce energy, focus, and a sense of urgency. To quote Bob Dylan, “Behind every beautiful thing is some kind of pain.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Metaphorical Systems

“Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience.

There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us.”
― Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World

Mary Pipher

“We can deal with our cultural and environmental crises only after we deal with our human crises of trauma, denial, and emotional paralysis. This will require that most difficult of all human endeavors, facing our own despair. This involves waking from our trance of denial, facing our own pain and sorrow, accepting the world as it is, adapting, and living more intentionally.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“Too many people only dream at night. I like to dream during the day.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“If you want to know the time, ask a dog. They always know, and they’ll tell you the correct time, which is now, now, now.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

Mary Pipher

“When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life…We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America…”
― Mary Pipher

Nguzo Saba: The Seven Principles

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To build and maintain our community together and make our brother's and sister's problems our problems and to solve them together.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

Nia (Purpose)
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

Kuumba (Creativity)
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

Imani (Faith)
To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

­ Maulana Karenga

50th Kwanzaa

Today marks the 50th annual celebration of Kwanzaa, the seven-day pan-African and African-American holiday that celebrates community, family, and culture. It’s celebrated by millions of African peoples across the globe. Its name is derived from “matunda ya kwanza,” which means “first fruits” in Swahili, the most widely spoken African language. The extra “a” on the end of “kwanza” was added because there were seven children present at the first celebration in 1966, and each child wanted to be represented by a letter.

In 1966, a graduate student named Maulana Karenga found himself disillusioned after the infamous Watts Riots (1965) in Los Angeles. He was already involved in community organizing and the Black Power movement as a way to bring African-Americans together, but he was also looking for something to honor the heritage that had been erased by the slave trade. He wanted, he said, “to give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Karenga began combining aspects of several African harvest celebrations, like those of the Ashanti and Zulu. He incorporated songs, dance, poetry, storytelling, and a traditional meal.

There are seven principles of Kwanzaa, known as Nguzo Saba:
Umoja (unity)
Kujichagulia (self-determination)
Ujima (collective work and responsibility)
Ujamaa (cooperative economics)
Nia (purpose)
Kuumba (creativity)
Imani (faith)

-from The Writer's Almanac

http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/index.shtml

Rumi

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
-Rumi

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
-Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
-Rumi

Imagination

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

Anne Lamott

I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.”

― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin

In the pope’s view, the church should emphasize humility and service to the poor. It should be multicultural, welcoming different styles of worship. It should reach out to other faiths and stand up for immigrants, refugees and nuns.

Article

Melody Moezzi

Wise words

Stephen King

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

Good Books

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

Art for Life

"Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
-Stephen King

In a culture drowning in reality television and celebrity memoirs, life sometimes seems like nothing more than grist for the mill or as a writer might put it, "material." This Stephen King quote reappraises the relative values of life and art and challenges you to rethink the role of art in your life. And if you're an artist or writer, it means even more: Don't live for the sake of your art; create art for the sake of your life.
source

Kabir

“It is time to put up a love-swing!
Tie the body and then tie the mind so that they
swing between the arms of the Secret One you love,
Bring the water that falls from the clouds to your eyes,
and cover yourself inside entirely with the shadow of night.
Bring your face up close to his ear,
and then talk only about what you want deeply to happen.
Kabir says: Listen to me, brother, bring the shape, face, and odor of the Holy One inside you.”
― Kabir, The Kabir book: Forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir, versions by Robert Bly

Kabir

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.”
― Kabir

Marge Piercy

One of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time.
― Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats

Marge Piercy

“In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.”
― Marge Piercy, Braided Lives

Attention is Love

“Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.”

― Marge Piercy, The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme

Marge Piercy

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”
― Marge Piercy

Evanescently

“Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.”
― Marge Piercy, Braided Lives

Alice Neel

“Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.”

“The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it.”

“I know all the theory of everything but when I paint I don't think of anything except the subject and me.”

“It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.”

“Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.”

“I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.”

“You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.”

“Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.”

“Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.”

“The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.”

“Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.”

“If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.”

“I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.”

“I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.”

Quotes by Alice Neel

John Steinbeck

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Steinbeck

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

Freedom of the Mind

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

John Steinbeck

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

Thich Nhat Hanh

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

You Can Love

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Our Own Life

“Our own life has to be our message.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology

Thich Nhat Hanh

“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh

Dream

I was a passenger in a swerving white Cadillac. We were in Newport RI and there was antique furniture for sale out on the sidewalks. "Stop," I yelled. We may have even bumped a couch but we jumped out of the car and acted like we wanted to buy it.

Is the Radio On?

"Is the radio on? I can barely hear it," she asked.
"I like it that way. It's a game for my brain. How quiet can I make the music? My brain fills in the gaps," he said, casting a blue shadow on his pillow.

On Writing

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Voltaire

Mood

“The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
― Voltaire

Voltaire

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

Every Man

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

― Voltaire

Arthur Miller

“You don't realize how people can hate, they can hate so much they'll tear the world to pieces.”
― Arthur Miller, All My Sons

Sing

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

Voltaire

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

Voltaire

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

Voltaire

"I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"
Voltaire, Candide

Voltaire

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles à M. Claparede, Professeur de Théologie à Genève, par un Proposant: Ou Extrait de Diverses Lettres de M. de Voltaire

Voltaire

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

― Voltaire

Arthur Miller

I don't think there is anything that approaches the theater. The sheer presence of a living person is always stronger than his image. But there's no reason why TV shouldn't be a terrific medium. The problem is that the audience watching TV shows is always separated. My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms. Yet it's not a hurdle that couldn't be jumped by the right kind of material. Simply, it's hard to get good movies, it's hard to get good novels, it's hard to get good poetry—it's impossible to get good television because in addition to the indigenous difficulties there's the whole question of it being a medium that's controlled by big business.
- Arthur Miller, Paris Review

Arthur Miller: On the Genesis of The Crucible

I thought of it first when I was at Michigan. I read a lot about the Salem witch trials at that time. Then when the McCarthy era came along, I remembered these stories and I used to tell them to people when it started. I had no idea that it was going to go as far as it went. I used to say, you know, McCarthy is actually saying certain lines that I recall the witch-hunters saying in Salem. So I started to go back, not with the idea of writing a play, but to refresh my own mind because it was getting eerie. For example, his holding up his hand with cards in it, saying, “I have in my hand the names of so-and-so.” Well, this was a standard tactic of seventeenth-century prosecutors … It was a way of inflicting guilt on everybody, and many people responded genuinely out of guilt; some would come and tell him some fantasy, or something that they had done or thought that was evil in their minds. Many times completely naive testimony resulted in somebody being hanged.
- Arthur Miller
(from an interview with the Paris Review in 1966)

Arthur Miller

“Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.”
― Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

“We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it.”
― Arthur Miller

Value

“Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”
― Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

“If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.”
― Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Arthur Miller

“I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.”
― Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

“If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.”
― Arthur Miller

Inner Chaos

“The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.”
― Arthur Miller

On the Verge

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
― Arthur Miller

Sam Shepard

“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.”
― Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

“Look it - you start out as an artist, I started out when I was nineteen, and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, “But there’s this whole other territory I’m leaving out.” And that territory becomes more important as you grow older. You begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield and all the rest of it. You have to start including that other side or die a horrible death as an artist with your shield stuck on the front of your face forever. You can’t grow that way. And I don’t think you can grow as a person that way, either. There just comes a point when you have to relinquish some of that and risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side.”
― Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

“There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.”
― Sam Shepard, True West

Edward Albee

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”
― Edward Albee

Albee

“If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?”
― Edward Albee, The Play About the Baby

Edward Albee

“Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.”
― Edward Albee

Edward Albee

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
― Edward Albee

August Wilson

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
― August Wilson

Strangers

“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”
― August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

Valley of the Blind

“In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
― August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean

August Wilson

“Everybody in a hurry to slow down.”
― August Wilson, Radio Golf

August Wilson

“My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.”
― August Wilson

Trust That Adventure

“Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure.”
― August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean

August Wilson

“All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.”
― August Wilson

Subtlety

The problem is that subtlety is not entertaining enough.

Black Out

The orange man is shouting
I unplug the radio, pull the shades
and hide behind the green couch

Eating Poetry

by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

- from Collected Poems by Mark Strand

the defense of poetry is inseparable from the defense of freedom

“I'm not a historian or a sociologist or a political scientist: I am a poet. My writings in prose are closely associated with my literary vocation and my artistic preferences. I prefer to speak of Marcel Duchamp or Juan Ramon Jimenes than of Locke and Montesquieu. Political philosophy has always interested me, but I never tried nor would try to write a book about justice, freedom or the art of government. Nevertheless, I published many essays and articles on the state of democracy in our time: the external and internal dangers that threatened and continue to threaten it, the doubts and ordeals it faces.”
- Octavio Paz

Paz was passionate about freedom, because, as he stated in his acceptance speech of the Tocqueville Award in 1989, he early on understood that the defense of poetry is inseparable from the defense of freedom and that the latter, in a dialectic of complementariness, requires democracy: “Without freedom democracy is despotism; without democracy freedom is a chimera.”
- Octavio Paz

source

As One Listens To The Rain

by Octavio Paz

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light footsteps, thin drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is still leaving,
the night has yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
at the turn of the corner,
figurations of time
at the bend in this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward, asleep
with all five senses awake,
it's raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,
air and water, words with no weight:
what we are and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time and heavy sorrow,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
wet asphalt is shining,
steam rises and walks away,
night unfolds and looks at me,
you are you and your body of steam,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, unhurried lightning,
you cross the street and enter my forehead,
footsteps of water across my eyes,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt's shining, you cross the street,
it is the mist, wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the surge of waves in your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a spring of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the next room?
not here, not there: you hear them
in another time that is now,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the grove,
lightning has nestled among the leaves,
a restless garden adrift-go in,
your shadow covers this page.

- Octavio Paz

The Unspoken

“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

― Octavio Paz, The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

Octavio Paz

No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.

― Octavio Paz

To Love

“To love is to undress our names.”
― Octavio Paz

Translate

“When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”
― Octavio Paz

Transcends

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
- Octavio Paz

Language

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
- Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.
- Octavio Paz

Interview Mark Strand

—why can’t we be a little more patient with poetry?

SHAWN

Maybe the New York Times reader just isn’t in the right frame of mind to read poetry.

STRAND

Well, you can’t expect to jump from The New York Times into John Ashbery or Jorie Graham. Language is put to a different test. And it’s used for different ends. The language of a poem is meant to be meditated on. You clear a psychic space for poetry that’s different from the one you clear for prose. It’s a space in which words loom large. And this cleansed psychic space that readies itself for a poem is really one in which the poem is both read and heard.

SHAWN

But how does a person prepare such a psychic space?

STRAND

Well, if you spend a lot of time alone, particularly if you’re thinking about your life, or other people’s lives, you’re already used to the space I’m talking about. There are certain painters I know to whom the language of poetry means a great deal. And it may be because these people spend a lot of time in front of canvases, alone, with nobody to talk to, that they’re prepared: they’re ready to take the poem in. Their minds are not full of a lot of noise and clutter and unfulfilled desire. I mean, you have to be willing to read poetry; you have to be willing to meet it halfway—because it won’t go any further than that if it’s any good. A poem has its dignity, after all. I mean, a poem shouldn’t beg you to read it; it’s pathetic, if that’s the case. Some poets fear that they won’t be heard unless they flatter the reader, go ninety percent of the way, do it all for the reader. But that’s pathetic.

SHAWN

Damn! I’m sort of worried that we’re not living in the right world to read what you and the poets you admire are writing.

Interview

Mark Strand Interview

Well, poetry—at least lyric poetry—tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self. But everything we want to do these days is an escape from self. People don’t want to sit home and think. They want to sit home and watch television. Or they want to go out and have fun. And having fun is not usually meditative. It doesn’t have anything to do with reassessing one’s experience and finding out who one is or who the other guy is. It has to do with burning energy. When you go to the movies, you’re overcome with special effects and monstrous goings-on. Things unfold with a rapidity that’s thrilling. You’re not given a second to contemplate the previous scene, to meditate on something that’s just happened—something else takes its place.

We seem to want instant gratification. Violent movies give you instant gratification. And drugs give you instant gratification. Sporting events give you instant gratification. Prostitutes give you instant gratification. This is what we seem to like. But that which requires effort, that which reveals itself only in the long term, that which demands some learning, patience, or skill—and reading is a skill—there’s not enough time for that, it seems. We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.

SHAWN

Maybe people avoid poetry because it somehow actively makes them nervous or anxious.

STRAND

They don’t want to feel the proximity of the unknown—or the mysterious. It’s too deathlike; it’s too threatening. It suggests the possibility of loss of control right around the corner.”
― Mark Strand

source

Mark Strand

“You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are. You are not there.”
― Mark Strand

Mark Strand

“A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”
― Mark Strand

Keeping Things Whole

by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

― Mark Strand, Selected Poems

When I Walk

“When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.”

― Mark Strand, Selected Poems

Blizzard of One

“From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.”

― Mark Strand, Blizzard of One

Shadow

“It came to my house.
It sat on my shoulders.
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.”
― Mark Strand

Strand

“Each moment is a place
you've never been.”

― Mark Strand, New Selected Poems

Mark Strand

We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.
- Mark Strand

We seem to want instant gratification. Violent movies give you instant gratification. And drugs give you instant gratification. Sporting events give you instant gratification. Prostitutes give you instant gratification. This is what we seem to like. But that which requires effort, that which reveals itself only in the long term, that which demands some learning, patience, or skill—and reading is a skill—there’s not enough time for that, it seems. We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.
- Mark Strand

Lines for Winter

by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

― Mark Strand, Selected Poems

Charles Simic

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

- Charles Simic

Lighthouse

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.

- Charles Simic

Orphan of Silence

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
- Charles Simic

Homeless Books

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Sweetness of Listening

“Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.”

― Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland

“In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.”
― Edward Hoagland

The Sun's Birthday

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires. In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun’s birthday. In ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even wars were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

- Writer's Almanac

Bipolarish

I'm not bipolar I'm bipolarish.
Does that mean you're from Bipolarland?
What?
If you're from Poland you're Polish, if you're from Bipolarland you're Bipolarish.

Today

On my walk downtown the Highway Department guys were picking up trash on Social Street including fishing out the broken beer bottles and coffee cups stashed in the bushes. We waved to each other. I wanted to cheer. Then on my way home I noticed two small squares of bloody gauze on the sidewalk in front of the dental clinic. Now there's a story, I thought. Later I took a walk with Lily to Harris Pond. The frozen pond was making noises. I wanted to tell the postman about the sounds but he was listening to his music.

Brautigan

“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

William Shakespeare

Now is the winter of our discontent.
(Richard III)

We have seen better days.
(Timon of Athens)

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
(The Merchant of Venice)

All that glitters is not gold.
(The Merchant of Venice)

Off with his head!
(Richard III)

- William Shakespeare

Neil Gaiman

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

Stephen Chbosky

We accept the love we think we deserve.
― Stephen Chbosky

William Shakespeare

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Cool Moss + Hot Coals

Mr. Robbins reportedly encourages firewalkers to think of the hot coals as “cool moss.” Here’s a better idea: think of them as hot coals. And as a San Jose fire captain, himself a wise philosopher, told The Mercury News: “We discourage people from walking over hot coals.”
source

Bashō Haiku

No oil to read by . . .
I am off to bed
but ah! . . .
My moonlit pillow

- Bashō

Bashō

Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!

- Bashō

Haiku by Bashō

Lady butterfly
perfumes her wings
by floating
Over the orchid

- Bashō

Bashō

Too curious flower
watching us pass,
met death . . .
Our hungry donkey

- Bashō

Bashō Haiku

Clouds come from time to time -
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.

- Bashō

Bashō

New Year’s first snow -- ah --
just barely enough to tilt
the daffodil

- Bashō

Bashō

Along the roadside,
blossoming wild roses
in my horse’s mouth

- Bashō

Dōgen

“Forgetting oneself is opening oneself”
― Dōgen

Dōgen

“When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.”
― Dōgen

Rabindranath Tagore

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Read the World

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

My Refuge is Humanity

Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live. I took a few steps down that road and stopped: for when I cannot retain my faith in universal man standing over and above my country, when patriotic prejudices overshadow my God, I feel inwardly starved.
― Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Butterfly

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Wisdom

“The small wisdom is like water in a glass:
clear, transparent, pure.
The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:
dark, mysterious, impenetrable.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore

“If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Fearless

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

Faith

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

Henry Miller

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
― Henry Miller

“Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.”
― Henry Miller

Henry Miller

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such”
― Henry Miller

Paul Eldridge

“A man is most accurately judged by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or to reciprocate.”
— Paul Eldridge (1888-1982) American educator, novelist, poet

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

George Orwell

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
― George Orwell

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Sam Wang

Democracy's Survival, Action Plan

Paul Klee

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”
― Paul Klee

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”
― Paul Klee

“Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.”
― Paul Klee

“After all, it's rather difficult to achieve the exact minimum, and it involves risks.”
― Paul Klee

“Becoming is superior to being.”
― Paul Klee

“Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.”
― Paul Klee

H.H. Munroe

“I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ”
― Saki (H.H. Munroe)

Leave Room

“In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”
― Saki, The Square Egg And Other Sketches (H.H. Munroe)

H.H. Munroe

“And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.”
― Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis (H.H. Munroe)

Finding a Sanctuary

“Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”
― Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

Faith in Man

“The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.”
― Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer

“It doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”
― Pico Iyer

Krishnamurti

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem. ”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves; and what is important in beginning with ourselves is the intention. The intention must be to understand ourselves and not to leave it to others to transform themselves or to bring about a modified change through revolution, either of the left or of the right. It is important to understand that this is our responsibility, yours and mine...”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Understanding Mankind

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Understanding + Transformation

“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

To Understand

“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is.

I think that will be enough, won't it?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Comfort

Yesterday I felt the cozy inner place of the cold dark days, when the days all feel like Saturday. Last night the howling wind kept me awake and worrying but it has finally stopped. This morning I awoke beating back the beast of panic and darkness. Then I remembered that my library is medicine.

I don't mind the cold. I do mind the wind and feeling trapped by it. In receive-mode I have to be able to step out for a walk, it is crucial to my sanity.

I prepped my bread dough and have a list of home chores. These acts are comforting.

Krishnamurti: Clarity

“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Freedom and Love

“Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Observe

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

Buckminster Fuller

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Dare to be naïve.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb

“Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity

“Either war is obsolete or men are.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“God is a verb”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Entropic Antientropic

“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Buckminster Fuller

“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader

Resources

“Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb

Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Study the Universe

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

One of a Kind

“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller: Bureacracies

“All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

Buckminster Fuller

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Choose

“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do,
it's a different kind of life.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller: Dare

“I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Give Them a Tool

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller: Literacy

“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Only Integrity Is Going to Count: Integrity Day, Los Angeles February 26, 1983

The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller: Genius

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller: Trimtab

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

Darkness

“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth,
As without light, nothing flowers.”
― May Sarton

May Sarton

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.”
― May Sarton

“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”
― May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal

Josh Groban

“The best way for me to teach myself an instrument is to just jam on it, and sound awful sometimes, and sound great other times,” he said. “Little things — just being able to find your keys with your eyes closed — took a long time. So I took it all around the world, this accordion.”
Article

Rumi

There is a community of the spirit.
Joint it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

- Rumi

From the Laboratory to the Street

“There is this false idea out there that these drugs are safe, because no one overdoses on marijuana,” he said.

These drugs move straight from the lab to the street, so the first trials of their effects are conducted on buyers.

Article

Nurture Their Authenticity

“It's not that there is no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end...Sensitive people...'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Inner World

“Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Select

“We often marvel at how introverted, geeky, kid 'blossom' into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it's not the children who change but their environments. As adults they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don't have to live in whatever culture they're plunked into.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Susan Cain

“We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in the world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power, but to use well the kind you've been granted. Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn't choose to go to Wonderland -- but she made of it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Housing, Health Care, Education

“The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Three New Ages

“The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Ethics

“The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics. We have seen in the last thirty years many examples of the power of ethics. The worldwide environmental movement, basing its power on ethical persuasion, has scored many victories over industrial wealth and technological arrogance. The most spectacular victory of the environmentalists was the downfall of the nuclear industry in the United States and many other countries, first in the domain of nuclear power and more recently in the domain of weapons. It was the environmental movement that closed down factories for making nuclear weapons in the United States, from plutonium-producing Hanford to warhead-producing Rocky Flats. Ethics can be a force more powerful than politics and economics.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Ethical Progress

“The ethical standards of scientists must change as the scope of the good and evil caused by science has changed. In the long run, as Haldane and Einstein said, ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

The Two Great Follies

“The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

More Books

“Samuel Gompers was the founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor. He established in America the tradition of practical bargaining between labor and management which led to an era of growth and prosperity for labor unions. Now, seventy years after Gomper's death, the unions have dwindled, while his dreams-more books and fewer guns, more leisure and less greed, more schoolhouses and fewer jails-have been tacitly abandoned. In a society without social justice and with a free-market ideology, guns, greed, and jails are bound to win.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Freeman Dyson

“The traditional respect which nations pay to military valor cannot be denied. As every country has a right to self-defense, every country has a right to give honor to its military leaders. But the honoring of military leaders brings deadly danger to mankind unless both the moral authority granted to them and the technical means at their disposal are strictly limited. Military power should never be confused with moral virtue, and military leaders should never be entrusted with weapons of unlimited destruction.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Both Directions

“The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.”

The Wreckers

“The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.”
― Freeman Dyson

Our Fate

“As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.”
― Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

“The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.”
― Freeman Dyson

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”
― Freeman Dyson

“We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!”
― Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia

Freeman Dyson

“The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs (of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.”
― Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia

Mind

“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.”
― Freeman Dyson

Our Task

“It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true.”
― Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”
― Freeman Dyson

Pictorial

“The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial.”
― Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”
― Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe

Exploring

“The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.”
― Freeman Dyson

Hay Theory of History

“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.”
― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions