The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
~ Mary Oliver
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Have it over
Don’t stand shivering upon the bank; Plunge in at once and have it over.
~ Haliburton
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Learners
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
~ Eric Hoffer
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Too late
When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.
~ Alexander Pope
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Reading
Reading must occur every day, but it is not just any daily reading that will do. The day’s reading must include at minimum a few lines whose principal intent is to be beautiful—words composed as much for the sake of their composition as for the meaning they convey.
~ Mandy Brown
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Passion
Passion creates, addiction consumes.
~ Gabor Maté
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Prioritize
I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.
~ Haruki Murakami
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Writer’s block
Re: Writer’s Block. Perhaps more should have it. Perhaps the disease, the dilemma, the affliction is trying to tell the writer something. Much that is being produced is unnecessary, indulgent. When the sincerity, the weird naïveté and enchanted stupor of writing leaves the host—the writer—one can only pray for their return, their reintegration.
~ Joy Williams
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Contentment
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
~ Ansel Adams
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Understanding
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
~ Upton Sinclair
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Bondage
The inability to think logically is a form of bondage. The refusal to think logically is proof of already being bound.
~ Kareem Abdul-Jabar
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Possibility
Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; It’s a commitment to search for possibilities.
~ Rebecca Solnit
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Driven a little mad
Reading is letting someone else model the world for you. This is an act of intimacy. When the author is morose, you become morose. When he is mirthful, eventually you may share it. And after finishing a very good book one is driven a little mad, forced to return from a world that no one nearby has witnessed.
~ Simon Sarris
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The actual work
The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.
~ Jessica Hische
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An agreeable tour
No enjoyment, however inconsiderable, is confined to the present moment. A man is happier for life from having made once an agreeable tour, or lived for any length of time among pleasant people, or enjoyed any considerable interval of innocent pleasure.
~ Sydney Smith
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The starting point
Always read with a pen handy. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the starting point for your own words.
~ Mandy Brown
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Test in the kitchen
Sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.
~ Charles Simic
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Emotions, institutions, technology
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
~ Edward O. Wilson
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Able to hear myself
I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
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Until I hear
I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.
~ Mary Rueflé
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