What is this little, agile, precious fire, this fluttering motion which we call the mind?
~ Prior
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Precious →
Strangeness →
This planet is genuinely strange. If we were all flown to the moon or to Mars and walked around on them, they wouldn’t seem that strange to us because there would be no yardsticks or anything to measure their strangeness by—they’re just vast museums of geology. Whereas the Earth is a deranged zoo, and somebody left the doors of the cages open. We have real strangeness because we can measure the degree to which things are or are not what they ought to be.
~ J. G. Ballard
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Room →
Giving yourself the time and sapce to think and feel is crucial to your existence. Personhood requires encapsulation. You have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself.
~ Jaron Lanier
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Giving →
The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
~ Annie Dillard
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Confidence →
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
~ Robert Hughes
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Perspective →
The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
~ Rousseau
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Wisdom →
I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; They start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.
~ David Brooks
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Virtue →
Beauty vanishes; Virtue is lasting.
~ Goethe
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Creativity →
The truth is that one day you hate yourself, and the next day you can’t wait to use your gifts.
~ Adam J. Kurtz
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The mind →
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
~ Milton
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