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