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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Contentment →
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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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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