And happiness is not overrated. It is everything.

We’re constantly trying not to get scammed these days. It’s too expensive to do anything. The planet is too hot. The wars are still happening and certain families are still getting rich off of said wars. The world is uninspiring – even downright depressing – if you look at it from a wide angle, but what are we to do in between fighting the good fight? We should celebrate each other. We should remember that we each have something to offer this world. We should – we must – do something for ourselves. And maybe we should put it out there for others. And whatever happens as a result will be such an adventure.  --Yasmin Aliya Khan, Excerpt from "Audacity and Adventure"

https://yazzzzzk.substack.com/p/audacity-and-adventure

“Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.” If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life there are few things more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples."  --Teddy Roosevelt uttered these words at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901. 

Reporter: “what are your plans for the housing bill?”

Trump: “I don’t— know. I think it’s so— unimportant by compared to— by compared to the Save America Act. the housing bill is a bill that can get approved. they worked on it long and hard. it’s very— bipartisan. that means Democrats like it. and it’s uhhhhh— maybe— even— uhhhhh, it’s, it’s probably maybe more that way, they’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody, nobody, no— well like me, in housing. I made a lot of— I made a lot of money. I made a lot of money with housing.”

"What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere."  --Robert Macfarlane, The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

“It's a beautiful world, you know. And kindness is very important, I think, it seems to be forgotten quite a lot.”  --Roger Taylor  (from Queen)

"Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."

"For what are the comprehensible terrors of a man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!"

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

"Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that."

Four from "The 74 most incredible lines in "Moby Dick" culled by Delia Cai

https://www.deezlinks.com/p/the-74-most-incredible-lines-in-moby

“Immigrant people can be stripped of almost everything, but never of their dignity, and they hold dreams that no one has the right to despise”.

“Human dignity has no passport nor loses value when crossing a border”.

--Pope Leo XIV

(Canary Islands, 11 June 2026). 

“Experience cannot be communicated without bonds of silence, concealment, distance.”  --Georges Bataille

“Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal, and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.”  --Ed Warren

"We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought–and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become the paragon."  ---Nabokov

"Across every culture and every era, we find the same phenomenon: human beings reaching toward something larger than themselves. They seek meaning: Why are we here? Do we matter? They seek to make some peace in the face of suffering and death. And they seek connection, a sense of belonging to something beyond the narrow circle of their immediate lives. These are not neurotic symptoms. They are expressions of genuine psychological and existential needs, and they persist whether or not one is religious, whether or not one believes in anything supernatural at all.

"The spiritual impulse, in short, is universal and real. It deserves to be taken seriously. The question is not whether to honor it, but how."

-- Michael Rivera, "A Profound Source: Science and the Maturing of Spirituality" 

https://thehumanist.com/commentary/a-profound-source-science-and-the-maturing-of-spirituality

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”  --Carl Sagan

“Espero alegre la salida – y espero no volver jamás” (“I joyfully await the exit – and I hope to never return”)  --Frida Kahlo

"You will never change your life until you change something you do daily."  --John C. Maxwell

"We overestimate the grand gesture and underestimate the daily one ...

Life is not changed by decisions. It's changed by what happens after the decision — the repeated, unglamorous, often invisible actions that actually accumulate into something."  --Arnold's Pump Club

https://arnoldspumpclub.com/blogs/newsletter/stop-asking-what-to-focus-on-ask-what-you-ll-regret-not-doing

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom the spreading laurel tree.

--W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer For My Daughter”

"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic."  --G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

“I think that little by little I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.”  --Frida Kahlo 

...[M]usic itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me."  --Denise S Robbins, "noticements: My belly button mole is a ghost named Boris," Mar 22, 2026  

https://denisesrobbins.substack.com/p/my-belly-button-mole-is-a-ghost-named

“They are deceiv’d that acquiesce to things which they have heard, and believe not what they have seen.”  --Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653)