"I hold that it is a man’s duty in this life to give to the world the benefit of his experience. All that he sees he should set down exactly as he sees it, and so simply, withal, that to the dullest comprehension the moral involved shall be perfectly obvious."  --John Kendrick Bangs, Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (1898) 

"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."  --Isaac Asimov

"Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say."  --Barbara Kingsolver

"In a 2015 interview, Kingsolver emphasized her passion for helping individuals find their voices. Through listening and processing what’s going on around us — and in other communities — we'll encounter and come up with new ideas, allowing us to advance the conversation [underline/bold me]."  -- inspiringquotes.com

“The truth that makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to hear.”  --Herbert Agar

"Change — real change — comes from the inside out."  --Stephen Covey

"Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them."  --Ursula K. Le Guin 

"If you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out."  --Stephen Hawking

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”  --Oscar Wilde

"The world only exists in your eyes... You can make it as big or as small as you want."  --F. Scott Fitzgerald

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."  --Oscar Wilde

"My life is full of mistakes. They’re like pebbles that make a good road."  --Beatrice Wood

"To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable!"  --Ludwig van Beethoven

"If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way." -- Napoleon Hill

"To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them."  --Montesquieu

"An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment."  --David Attenborough

"Newton’s 4th Law of Physics:

"Any abandoned store will inevitably become a Spirit Halloween after an indefinite period of time."

--Autumn | MRG (@AutumnMaeTV) August 24, 2021

"We turn not older with years, but newer every day."  --Emily Dickinson 

"We seem to be so detached from, or simply have no access to, this amazing acoustic underwater world. I think it’s about time that we change that."  --Olaf Meynecke, Griffith University

"Bruckner's compositions are a mystery as the whole person is a mystery. How someone who comes from such a narrow background, from rural circumstances, can write such a work with such incredible foresight and aura … When I look at the score as an expert, as a professional, I see this unbelievable mastery that is technically embedded in there. But none of that plays a role in listening. I don’t have to know anything about Bruckner, I don’t have to be able to read notes and still I can be touched."  -- Markus Poschner

"Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are."  --HG Wells

"Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light."  --Brené Brown

"In her now-famous TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” professor and author Brené Brown posits that the only way to make true connections is to let our full selves be seen by others. Often, the things we hold back or feel shame around, Brown explains, are the ones that make us human. Brown reassures us that vulnerability is a strength rather than a weakness: In acknowledging every part of who we are, even the difficult ones, we can fortify our relationship with both ourselves and others."  --inspiringquotes.com

"Never be afraid to be a poppy in a field of daffodils."  --Michaela DePrince 

"Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been."  --

David Bowie 

"There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts."  --Helen Fagin

"In the Warsaw Ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland, 21-year-old Helen Fagin defied the fascist regime by secretly teaching Jewish children mathematics, Latin, and the transportive wonders of literature. After smuggling in a copy of “Gone With the Wind,” Fagin recounted the story of Scarlett O’Hara to her enraptured class. In a letter penned more than 75 years later, Fagin reflected on the power of hope and dreams, recalling how she was forever touched by the way the gripping tale was able to free her young students from the horrors of their reality."  inspiringquotes.com

We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half heard, in the stillness

Between the two waves of the sea.

--T.S. Eliot

"Patience is also a form of action."  --Auguste Rodin

"I believe that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."  --Viola Davis

She was the first Black woman to collect an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy, aka the Triple Crown of Acting. 

"You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather."  --Pema Chödrön

"The man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something."  --Vincent van Gogh

"Never underestimate your ability to make someone else's life better - even if you never know it."  --Olympic diver, four-time gold medalist Greg Louganis

“Every progressive knows that human beings are equal and that the fight for that equality implies physical and mental emancipation and therefore, no one who considers themselves human can generalize transphobia in weak minds or slavery and discrimination. This action does not express animality but brutality. That’s why they murder those who are different and by the millions. That is why Nazis existed and exist.”  --President Gustavo Petro of Columbia 7-2-24

“A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”  --Susan Sontag 

"(But) that is the aspect of Schumann’s gift that is most unusual: personal as his music may be, what it describes is universal enough that a remarkable number of people feel that it has a special resonance for them. It is music that articulates the most private thoughts of a large public—individual by individual.

"And to be clear, I am speaking about a very extreme degree of privacy. There are, for all of us, the things we tell everyone, the things we tell just a few people, the things we tell only loved ones (and perhaps therapists), and the things we tell only ourselves. And then, of course, there are the things we do not even admit to ourselves; it is at that level that Schumann’s music operates. Over and over again, in piece after piece, he reaches deep within himself for that which is most obscured, and makes it feel like everyone’s obscurity. This is a quality to be treasured; it is also dangerous as hell. To acknowledge one’s frailty is healthy; to stare at it repeatedly, with a magnifying glass, under fluorescent lights, is not. But that is just what Schumann does."  --Jonathan Bliss

"Everything which goes on in the world affects me, politics, literature, people. I think about everything in my own way, which then wants to find a release through music; it wants to find an outlet. That is why many of my compositions are so difficult to understand, for they establish ties with distant interests, often importantly so, because everything that is strange in our times moves me and I must then articulate it musically in turn."  --Robert Schumann

"What storytellers do — and this includes journalists and TED and everyone in between who has a point of view and an audience, whatever its size — is help shape our stories of how the world works; at their very best, they can empower our moral imagination to envision how the world could work better. In other words, they help us mediate between the ideal and the real by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope. Truth and falsehood belong to this mediation, but it is guided primarily by what we are made to believe is real.

"What we need, then, are writers like William Faulkner, who came of age in a brothel, saw humanity at its most depraved, and yet managed to maintain his faith in the human spirit. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he asserted that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart.” In contemporary commercial media, driven by private interest, this responsibility to work in the public interest and for the public good recedes into the background. And yet I continue to stand with E.B. White, who so memorably asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life”; that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down.” 

"Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave."  --Maria Popova, "Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves"

"The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal ...

"Tragedy asks us … to walk a delicate line. We are to acknowledge that life’s miseries strike deep, striking to the heart of human agency itself. And yet we are also to insist that they do not remove humanity, that the capacity for goodness remains when all else has been removed ...

"If we understand that injustice can strike its roots into the personality itself, producing rage and resentment and the roots of bad character, we have even deeper incentives to commit ourselves to giving each child the material and social support that human dignity requires. A compassionate society … is one that takes the full measure of the harms that can befall citizens beyond their own doing; compassion thus provides a motive to secure to all the basic support that will undergird and protect human dignity."  --Martha Nussbaum

“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.”  --Irvin D. Yalom

“[N]ot everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  --James Baldwin

"Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons ...

"It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings ...

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone ...

"It’s important to emphasize that hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it."

--Rebecca Solnit from _Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities_ (2017)

“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”  -- Maira Kalman

“There is no love of life without despair of life”  --Albert Camus 

"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being."  --Hafiz 

"Always remember: Silence and smile are two very powerful tools."  --Paulo Coelho

"Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s books — in particular, his beloved 1988 bestseller, “The Alchemist” — are infused with a spirituality that has resonated with millions of readers. In 2017 he took to Twitter to offer his followers this piece of advice. “Smile is the way to solve many problems,” he wrote. “Silence is the way to avoid many problems.” Coelho reminds us that the power of words can cut both ways, and the discretion to know when to keep quiet and offer a kind smile is just as valuable."  --inspiringquotes.com

"Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try ...

"The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world."  --Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (2015)

"There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours."  --Maria Popova

"It is a mercy that we walk through the world half-blind to the reality of time and transience, or we would be walking through it in tears — through the immense cathedral of time that Earth is, with its neatly lined pews of geologic strata holding the history of life, which is the history of loss. And yet the very fact that any one life exists against the cosmic odds of eternal night and nothingness is miracle enough — a triumph of the possible over the probable, a concatenation of chemistry and chance gilded with wonder."  --Maria Popova

"Once, walking through a centuries-old gilded cathedral in a small Mexican town with a beloved companion, I found myself in tears at the thought of all the people now dead who once sat in those pews and lit candles at that altar and whispered their hopes to those saints; at the realization that we too will have been, that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be a votive melted in a pool of itself."  --Maria Popova 

"Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder.

"This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it — a willingness woven of two things: total wakefulness to reality and total openness to possibility."  --Maria Popova

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."  --Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (2005)

Donald Sutherland's motto in 2005 (I don't know if it changed since):

"Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom." —Joseph Brodsky

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"  --Richard Dawkins

He was telling a friend about his recently failed relationship when the other drew an odd but interesting analogy. Talking about this ex-love, they said “She sounds like she was a snorkeler, not a scuba diver.”

He was confused. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“A snorkeler is content to float just below the surface of the water, looking at whatever pretty fish and reefs are within sight. At any sign of danger they can surface, swim back to the boat and get out quickly. 

"But the scuba diver wants to go deep because they know that’s where the really interesting things live. To do that though you’ve got to be willing to learn how to use and wear heavy equipment. Plus we all know diving into the depths can often be very dangerous. 

“I believe for real loves, the long lasting loves, even just the ones that are memorable and important to our growth, both of you need to be scuba divers. To make it real, to make a bond last and genuinely mean something, you’ve both got to be willing to put on the 'equipment' and go deep.” She smiled “Most of all, you have to have the courage and curiosity to swim into the caves and the darkness down there where the big ones live.”

--Jonathan Carroll

"For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive."  --Ann Patchett 

"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery,"  --Charles Darwin

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."  --Will Durant 

“Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us." —Matthew Scully 

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."  --Amelia Earhart 

"It's so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human? Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie."  -- the incredible Maren Morris to country singer Jason Aldean's wife after she posted a transphobic Instagram post.she posted a transphobic Instagram post.

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside ... Nature brings solace in all troubles."  --Anne Frank

"True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have."  --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

"French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the classic 1943 novel “The Little Prince,” wrote often on themes of love, suffering, and connection. Saint-Exupéry himself was known for his long, complex marriage to writer and artist Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who inspired the character of the Rose in “The Little Prince.” In the book, the Prince and the Rose eventually realize that while they do love each other, they show it in different ways. With this line, Saint-Exupéry reminds us that true love should always feel nourishing."  --inspiringquotes.com

“The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”  --Steven Furtick

“Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.”  --Friedrich Nietzsche

"Life is a collection of moments. Mindfulness is beautification of the moments."  --Amit Ray

"Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood."  --Mary Rakow

“Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.”  --Friedrich Nietzsche 

"Nice is different than good."  --Stephen Sondheim 

"Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure."  --Stephen King 

“What I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.”--  David Bowie

 Mexican saying: El que se enoja pierde  = He who gets angry, loses. 

"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."  --Lewis Carroll

"As Alice makes her journey through Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s beloved 1865 children’s story “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” the young girl comes upon an unpleasant Duchess, described as having a sharp and pointy chin. To Alice’s discomfort, the Duchess rests her chin on the child’s shoulder and shares this bit of wisdom. If a bizarre old Duchess can uncover lessons and meaning in the topsy-turvy world of Wonderland, we’re sure to find them in our own lives, too, on this side of the looking glass."  --inspiringquotes.com  

"Mankind was not made to suffer. Bliss is our nature."  --David Lynch

"We live on a fragile island of life, in a universe of possibilities. For many millennia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there. Is it really just us? Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics? Well, if we are, it’s an awful waste of space. But, what if we’re not?

"What if, out there, others are asking and answering similar questions? What if they look up at the night sky, at the same stars, but from the opposite side? Would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence? Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we're born in San Francisco, or Sudan, or close to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from."  --Excerpt from Jill Tarter's 2009 TED Talk (2009 TED Prize winner)

"A small act is worth a million thoughts."  --Ai Weiwei 

"When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it."  --B.F. Skinner 

 “Some things are better, but not enough things.”  --Vera Rubin

THE END

by Mark Strand

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,

Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like

When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,

Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,

When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down

No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.

When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus

And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,

Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing

When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

"We are all navigating an external world — but only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience… The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind."  Janna Levin

“I don’t think you come back,” [Shatner] said. “I don’t think there’s life after death. I think this is it. This is the journey you take. This is the sadness, the joy, the ecstasy, the love that you feel in this one participation in life. So you have to take the bad with the good. Let the bad wash over you. And I’m saying this theoretically, because so many times in the bad parts, it’s awful. It’s hard to do. But if you keep that in mind—I will do this; I will participate in life and not hide; I will boldly go into that hurt locker again—that’s the only way to do it. The only way to live.”  --William Shatner

*From "William Shatner’s Next ‘Bold’ Adventure: Facing Death" by Kevin Fallon

"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."  --Stanley Kubrick

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality."  --Yoko Ono

"Without consciousness there is nothing. The only way you experience your body and the world of mountains and people, trees and dogs, stars and music is through your subjective experiences, thoughts, and memories. You act and move, see and hear, love and hate, remember the past and imagine the future. But ultimately, you only encounter the world in all of its manifestations via consciousness. And when consciousness ceases, this world ceases as well ... Consciousness is the central fact of your life."  Cristof Koch

"I want to make drawings that move some people. (...) I want to reach the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply and that man feels subtly."  --Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, The Hague, about 21 July 1882

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."  --Vincent van Gogh

"Mistakes are part of the game. It's how well you recover from them, that's the mark of a great player."  --Alice Cooper

How have I peace

Except by subjugating

Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch

How this be

Except by Abdication —

Me — of Me?

--Emily Dickinson

“Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it,”  --Albert Camus 

“When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.”--RuPaul

"There is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."  --Amanda Gorman

"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together."  --Desmond Tutu

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”  -- Nikola Tesla

Mike Rickseck adds resonance.

“Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you’ve left a mark.”  --Dorian Corey from the film  'Paris is Burning' 

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."  --Albert Camus 

"The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions."  --Alfred Adler

"Our heads are round so thought can change direction."  --Francis Picabia 

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."  --Dolly Parton 

"As one goes through life, one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move."  --Katharine Hepburn 

“To anybody who has ever questioned your identity – ever, ever, ever, ever – or you find yourself living in the gray spaces, I promise you this: There is indeed a place for us.”  --Ariana DeBose said this during her acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Anita in West Side Story. She was the first Afro-Latina and first out queer woman of color to win an acting Oscar.

"Happiness is a simple, frugal heart."  --Nikos Kazantzakis

“The holy man is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you choose your holy man, you surrender your will. You give it to him in utter submission, in full renunciation.”  --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 

“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”  --Jonathan Swift, “The Examiner" (1710)

"In the depths of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."  --Albert Camus

"There is only one success... to be able to spend your life in your own way."  --Christopher Morley 

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."  --Ludwig Wittgenstein

"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple."  --Annie Dillard 

 For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.  --Hermann Hesse

"It is childish and stupid to ask whether this one or that one is guilty. I propose that for one short hour we ask ourselves instead: “What about myself? What has been my share of the guilt? When have I been too loudmouthed, too arrogant, too credulous, too boastful? What is there in me that may have helped… all the illusions that have so suddenly collapsed?'"  --Hermann Hesse

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”  --Joan Didion 

"Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path."  --Hermann Hesse

“I am here, that I may wonder!”  -Goethe

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."  --Jodi Picoult

"Accommodating the unbearable and the unacceptable is easier than doing the right thing—and then it becomes habitual. Eventually, we use it to let ourselves off the hook, because that’s easier, too." -- Mary L. Trump 

“Of all fires, love is the only inexhaustible one.”  --Pablo Neruda

"Success isn’t about how your life looks to others; it’s about how it feels to you."  --Michelle Obama

"Harlem", by Langston Hughes 

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

      

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

     

Or does it explode?

"The Purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human." --Aldous Huxley

"You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. " --Pablo Neruda 

"The best consolation, if not the only remedy, is, it still seems to me, profound friendships."  --Vincent van Gogh to Paul Signac, Arles, 10 April 1889

"We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite. And what we absorb of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for expression."  --Rockwell Kent 

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man’s."  --Mark Twain

"Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished."  --Dean Koontz

"Admire as much as you can, most people don't admire enough."  --Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” [my favorite painting] is widely considered one of the best and most famous paintings in history. But according to letters sent to his brother Theo, Van Gogh was staying in an asylum for depression at the time he began that masterpiece, and he wasn’t permitted to paint in his room. After admiring the sky from his bedroom window in the morning, he relied on the deep impression the sky had left in his memory once he had access to his paints. This story lends a poignant depth to his advice to admire all we can, which itself comes from another letter to Theo. Van Gogh’s appreciation for the beauty around him, even in the most challenging of circumstances, led him to produce perhaps his greatest work. What beauty might we glean from our own lives if we were to also cultivate a deep level of admiration for the world around us?