If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; If you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
~ James Baldwin
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It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The idea of the painter and the sculptor is undoubtedly that perfect and excellent example of the mind, by imitation of which imagined form all things are represented which fall under human sight.
~ John Dryden
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Something that irritates you. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: Discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
~ James Baldwin
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Only actions give life strength; Only moderation gives it a charm.
~ Richter
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Moderation resembles temperance. We are not so unwilling to eat more, as afraid of doing ourselves harm by it.
~ Rochefoucauld
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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
~ W. H. Auden
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The superior man wishes to be slow in his words and earnest in his conduct.
~ Confucius
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Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
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The specific outcome is not the primary driver of our practice. […] We can begin with this: If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success? The first step is to separate the process from the outcome. Not because we don’t care about the outcome. But because we do.
~ Seth Godin
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All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What I tell young people is if you identify your goals, and have the willpower to overcome difficulties—there will always be certain difficulties—and you find the right people to help you, you will be successful.
~ Reinhold Messner
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It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.
~ Aristotle
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Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
~ J. Stuart Mill
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He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace.
~ John Ruskin
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Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
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Our instincts as humans are slowly dimming the less time we spend in wild nature: rainstorms, cold, whiteouts, loose rocks, adventure. Climbing is an important and sacred opportunity for us to exist in situations that we faced a hundred thousand years ago. The animalistic side of human beings. Our instincts are an important element of our intelligence.
~ Reinhold Messner
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In everything the middle course is best: All things in excess bring trouble to men.
~ Plautus
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Indeed, the grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older; Societies better.
~ Bovee
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It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
~ Longfellow
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