I realized I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. It was the happiness of the right-before, when everything is potential and no branch on the tree of possibility has yet been closed off by action.
-- Dawn Drzal
Pursuing active retirement. Seeing the world. Striving for an agile mind, body, and spirit.
I realized I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. It was the happiness of the right-before, when everything is potential and no branch on the tree of possibility has yet been closed off by action.
-- Dawn Drzal
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.
-- Melody Beattie
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
-- Immanuel Kant
Why some things—a word, a glance, a scene glimpsed from a window, a random memory, a fragrance, a conversational anecdote, a fragment of music, or of a dream—have the power to stimulate us to intense creativity while most others do not, we are unable to say.
-- Joyce Carol Oates
In order to improve your writing, you have to practice just like any other sport. But don't be dutiful and make it into a blind routine. "Yes, I have written an hour today and I wrote an hour yesterday and an hour the day before." Don't just put in your time. That is not enough. You have to make great effort. Be willing to put your whole life on the line when you sit down for writing practice. Otherwise you are just mechanically pushing the pen across the page and intermittently looking at the clock to see if your time is up.
Some people hear the rule "Write every day" and do it and don't improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the Goody Two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn't into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.
-- Natalie Goldberg
But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.
-- Oscar Wilde
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.
-- Isaac Asimov
I have a dream that the people in power, as well as the media, start treating this crisis like the existential emergency it is.
-- Greta Thunberg
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
-- John Ruskin
America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don't know yet if that can hold.
-- Barack Obama
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
People who have trouble coming up with good ideas, if they're telling you the truth, will tell you they don't have very many bad ideas. But people who have plenty of good ideas, if they're telling the truth, will say they have even more bad ideas. So the goal isn't to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.
-- Seth Godin
The secret to happiness, of course, is not getting what you want. It’s wanting what you get.
- Alex Trebek, RIP 11/08/20
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.
--Robert Ardrey
Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
-- Abraham Lincoln
The trick to writing well is to...
- take long sentences and make them short
- take confusing ideas and make them clear
- take unrelated concepts and make them related
...without losing the main idea in the process.
-- James Clear
There is only one time that is important— Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.
-- Leo Tolstoy
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
-- David Foster Wallace
― Barbara Kingsolver
We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our families, cherishing our friends and living our lives.
-- Maya Angelou
It’s not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It’s the hand that casts the ballot.
-- Harry Truman
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
-- Dorothy Day
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-- Plato
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
-- Robert M Hutchins