Quote of the Day -- Richard Powers

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts' daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

-- Richard Powers, Bewilderment

Quote of the Day -- Galileo Galilei

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

-- Galileo Galilei

Quote of the Day -- Linda Hogan

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

-- Linda Hogan

Quote of the Day -- Merce Cunningham

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

-- Merce Cunningham

Quote of the Day -- David Foster Wallace

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-- David Foster Wallace

Quote of the Day -- Alanis Obamsawin

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.

-- Alanis Obamsawin

Quote of the Day -- Chris Cleave

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel.

-- Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

Quote of the Day -- Gail Sheehy

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. 

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. 

As Dostoevsky put it, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." The real fear should be of the opposite course."

-- Gail Sheehy

Quote of the Day -- Anne Tyler

I read so that I can live more than one life in more than one place.

-- Anne Tyler

Quote of the Day -- Elijah Cummings

Our decisions about transportation determine much more than where roads or bridges or tunnels or rail lines will be built. They determine the connections and barriers that people will encounter in their daily lives - and thus how hard or easy it will be for people to get where they need and want to go.

-- Elijah Cummings

Quote of the Day -- John O'Donohue

...may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service, which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can find elegance, and where crippled hope can find wings, and torment enter at last unto the grace of serenity.

-- John O'Donohue

Quote of the Day -- Charles Blow

I had spent my whole life trying to fit in, but it would take the rest of my life to realize that some men are just meant to stand out.

-- Charles Blow

Quote of the Day -- Desmond Tutu

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

-- Desmond Tutu

Quote of the Day -- Stendhal

A good book is an event to me.

-- Stendhal

Quote of the Day -- Kurt Vonnegut

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

Quote of the Day -- Ernest Hemingway

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

-- Ernest Hemingway

Quote of the Day -- Adam Grant

A sign of intellect is the ability to change your mind in the face of new facts. 

A mark of wisdom is refusing to let the fear of admitting you were wrong stop you from getting it right. 

The joy of learning something new eventually exceeds the pain of unlearning something old.

-- Adam Grant

Quote of the Day -- Walter Landor

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

-- Walter Landor

Quote of the Day -- Christopher Alexander

Very few things have so much effect on the feeling inside a room as the sun shining into it.

-- Christopher Alexander

Quote of the Day -- Dag Hammarskjold

 We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

-- Dag Hammarrskjold

Quote of the Day -- Leo Tolstoi

You should know that when a message you convey to another person is not understood by him, at least one of the following things is true: what you have said is not true, or you have conveyed it without kindness.

-- Leo Tolstoi

Quote of the Day -- Hannah Arendt

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

-- Hannah Arendt

Quote of the Day -- Carl Sagan

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.

-- Carl Sagan

Quote of the Day -- Gretchen Rubin

Nothing is more exhausting than the task that is never started.

-- Gretchen Rubin

Quote of the Day -- Japanese Wisdom

 

 ‘May all sentient beings …’ ” “… be free from needless suffering.” Where does that come from, anyway?  … I told him. It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”

—  Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel

Quote of the Day -- Anne Lamott

 ... the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

-- Anne Lamott

Quote of the Day -- Rabindranath Tagore

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy.

 Rabindranth Tagore

Quote of the Day -- Audre Lorde

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

-- Audre Lorde

Quote of the Day -- Alexander Dumas

Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives and remembering what one receives.

-- Alexander Dumas

Quote of the Day -- Diane Ackerman

Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? 

Flora or fauna, we are all shapeshifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

-- Diane Ackerman

Quote of the Day -- Sandra Cisneros

A library is a medicine cabinet. What can heal one person may not work at all for somebody else.

-- Sandra Cisneros

Quote of the Day -- Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

-- Cyril Connolly

Quote of the Day -- Henry David Thoreau

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day -- James Clear

The trajectory of your life bends in the direction of your habits.

-- James Clear

Quote of the Day -- Henry David Thoreau

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! 

-- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day -- James Clear

Maturity is learning how to start when you feel like procrastinating and learning how to listen when you feel like talking.

-- James Clear

Quote of the Day -- Maya Angelou

I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics — New York critics as a rule — who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

-- Maya Angelou

Quote of the Day -- Paul Ehrlich

There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.

-- Paul Ehrlich

Quote of the Day -- Audre Lorde

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.

-- Audre Lorde

Quote of the Day -- April 25

It showed me one thing that being an adult meant. You were no longer limited to observing the world: Now you could join it. Instead of just being a fan of things you loved, you could get inside them. You could make them yourself.

-- Susan Burton

Quote of the Day -- Carl Sagan

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

-- Carl Sagan

Quote of the Day -- Barbara Ward

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

-- Barbara Ward

Quote of the Day -- John Wooden

There is a wonderful, almost mystical, law of nature that says three of the things we want most—happiness, freedom, and peace of mind—are always attained when we give them to others. Give it away to get it back.

-- John Wooden

Quote of the Day -- Katherine May

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

-- Katherine May

Quote of the Day -- Richard Edelman

In this period of information bankruptcy and instability, business has to be a primary source of objective facts, a catalyst for change and a standard-bearer for universal values.

-- Richard Edelman

Quote of the Day -- Rachel Maddow

Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.

-- Rachel Maddow

Quote of the Day -- Madeleine Maddow

... the purpose of foreign policy is to persuade others to do what we want or, better yet, to want what we want.

-- Madeleine Albright

Quote of the Day -- Mwai Kibaki

Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.

-- Mwai Kibaki

Quote of the Day -- Luther Standing Bear

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.

-- Luther Standing Bear