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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Quotes
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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Relationships
I’m saying that it is necessary to share meaning. A society is a link of relationships among people and institutions, so that we can live together. But it only works if we have a culture—which implies that we share meaning; i.e., significance, purpose, and value. Otherwise it falls apart.
~ David Bohm
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Just kidding
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
~ Isaac Asimov
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Little things
The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
~ Ernest Dimnet
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Irritation
A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
~ Kevin Kelly
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There is a tide
There is a tide in the affairs of men
~ “Brutus“
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea as we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
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On creativity
A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All this happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may sharpen our art.
~ Jorge Luis Borges
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Flattery
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
~ Denis Diderot
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If possible
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
~ Goethe
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Silence
Silence is exhilarating at first—as noise is—but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
~ Edward Hoagland
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Fear
Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
~ Francis Chan
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Growth
There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.
~ Fred Rogers
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Creativity
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
~ Anthony Jay
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Knowledge
A great challenge of life: Knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong.
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Sight
I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.
~ Agnes Varda
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Travel
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
~ Paul Auster
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