"I am out with lanterns looking for myself."
— Emily Dickinson
"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."
— Richard Feynman
"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride."
— John F. Kennedy
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours
Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
— Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems
"You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."
— Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand."
— Ada Lovelace
"To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing — this is my constant work."
— Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
"Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue."
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
"Smile — it increases your face value."
— Dolly Parton
"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find."
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
"Je ne veux pas expliquer ma passion – cela reviendrait à la considérer comme une erreur ou un désordre dont il faut se justifier – mais simplement l'exposer."
"I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it."
— Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion
"For every door that's been opened to me, I've tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Let's invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It's not about being perfect. It's not about where you get yourself in the end. There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become."
— Michelle Obama, Becoming
"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
"It is a great art to saunter."
— Henry David Thoreau
"It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1843
The Whole Earth Catalog · final issue, 1974
"The main thing is to care. Care very hard, even if it is only a game you are playing."
— Billie Jean King
"Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own."
— Zadie Smith
"The most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found."
— Barack Obama
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
"We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket."
— Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime
"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
— Steve Jobs
"There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind."
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
"The theme of all my books is that true creativity and innovation come from being able to stand at the intersection of art and science."
— Walter Isaacson
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
"I became totally absorbed into this forest existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life; a perfect opportunity, it might seem, for meditating on the meaning of existence and my role in it all. But I was far too busy learning about the chimpanzees' lives to worry about the meaning of my own. I had gone to Gombe to accomplish a specific goal, not to pursue my early preoccupation with philosophy and religion. Nevertheless, those months at Gombe helped to shape the person I am today—I would have been insensitive indeed if the wonder and the endless fascination of my new world had not had a major impact on my thinking. All the time I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around. For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can even describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected. The beauty was always there, but moments of true awareness were rare. They would come, unannounced; perhaps when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn; or looking up through the rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and the black shadows and the occasionally ensured bright fleck of blue sky; or when I stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still warm trunk of a tree and looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, softly sighing water of Lake Tanganyika."
— Jane Goodall
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
— Simone Weil
"If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers…"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Living life as an artist is a practice.
You are either engaging in the practice
or you're not.
It makes no sense to say you're not good at it.
It's like saying, "I'm not good at being a monk."
You are either living as a monk or you're not.
We tend to think of the artist's work as the output.
The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.
— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
"Sweat the small stuff. Without letting anyone see you sweat."
— Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
"To me, it's simple: if you've got the time, use it to get ready. What else could you possibly have to do that's more important? Yes, maybe you'll learn how to do a few things you'll never wind up actually needing to do, but that's a much better problem to have than needing to do something and having no clue where to start."
— Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
"I shall gain glory or die."
— Seamus Heaney, Beowulf
"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."
— Rosalind Franklin
"After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we've just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour."
— Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
— Bertrand Russell
"I definitely feel there's room for improvement."
— Roger Federer, while ranked world #1
"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough."
— Toni Morrison
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!