Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Mariame Kaba, “We Do This Till We Free Us”

It's less about 'how you feel' and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you're still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you're still going to get up in the morning. And you're still going to struggle … It's work to be hopeful.

John Dos Passos, Letter to Rumsey Marvin Paris, 29th December 1918

Don't worry about not having an aim. I felt the same way when I first went to college. It took me a good three years to get rid of family bred inhibitions before I realized exactly what I wanted to do. When I think how far I am from doing it I become terrified. Then too I suffer from a multiplicity of desires. I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.

George Bernard Shaw

 Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight.

Leonard Bernstein

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

Andre Gid

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

Amanda Gorman, "Hymn for the Hurting"

…

May our signed right to bear arms

Never blind our sight from shared harm

…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be "innate" in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.

Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams 1776

Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it's their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.

Billy Wilder in Paris Review

When I was a writer at Paramount, the studio had a swarm of writers under contract—a hundred and four! They worked in the Writers Building, the Writers Annex, and the Writers Annex Annex. All of us were writing! We were not getting big salaries but we were writing. It was fun. We made a little money. Some like Ben Hecht made a lot of money. All the writers were required to hand in eleven pages every Thursday. Why on Thursday? Who knows? Why eleven pages? Who knows?

Orson Wells

It's only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age.

Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes"

…When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember.

Spike Lee in the New York Times 2-22-22

And when young filmmakers come to you for advice, what do you tell them?

You bust your ass. At work. That's the thing I harp on. Work ethic. Work ethic. Work ethic. You got to work.

Aretha Franklin in Detroit Free Press

You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can't just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn't come off the way you thought it should come off.

Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes”

…

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Abraham Lincoln

"I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?"

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it's their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.

bell hooks, All About Love

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.
Institutions do not protect themselves.
They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.

Simone de Beauvoir, Letter to Nelson Algren, 1947

It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to his daughter 1854

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.  

G. K. Chesterton, "Creation Day"

…

Never again with cloudy talk
Shall life be tricked or faith undone,
The world is many and is mad,
But we are sane and we are one.

Lauren Groff, Matrix

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.

Joan Didion Commencement Address at Riverside, 1975

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

Jenny Offill, Weather

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. 

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you." 

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. 

bell hooks, Thinking About Love

"One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. 

It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself."

Lisel Mueller - “Tears”

The first woman who ever wept

was appalled at what stung

her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Saltwater. Seawater. 

How was it possible? 

Hadn't she and the man

spent many days moving

upland to where the grass

flourished, where the stream

quenched their thirst with sweet water?

How could she have carried these sea drops

as if they were precious seeds; 

where could she have stowed them? 

She looked at the watchful gazelles

and the heavy-lidded frogs;

she looked at glass-eyed birds

and nervous, black-eyed mice.

None of them wept, not even the fish

that dripped in her hands when she caught them.

Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body. 

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

She was handling it well, even though some mornings she put her bra on inside-out and it seemed too hard to fix, so she just sat there staring at the news in an inside-out bra. She was handing it just fine, even though her face had been replaced by one question mark after another question mark after another question mark, and her heart had been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach, and the only way it was possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and say out loud, "Cows don't know about him."

 

Charles B. Brenner & Jeffrey M. Zacks in Scientific American, December 13, 2011

So there's the thing we know best:  The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do.  We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn't pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn't important enough.  But a "completely different" idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame.  The first part of their paper's title sums it up:  "Walking through doorways causes forgetting."

…

The doorway effect suggests that there's more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried.  Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.  Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an "event model," and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues.  That thing in the box?  Oh, that's from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. 

Jerry Seinfeld

Pain is knowledge rushing in very fast.

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

John Maynard Keynes

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Oscar Wilde, "Don't Forget to Sing in the Lifeboats"

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

William Blake, "Nurse's Song" - Songs of Experience

Then come home, my children, the sun has gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.

David Foster Wallace - “This Is Water”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Sheldon Kopp, If You Meet The Buddha on the Road, Kill Him

You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the paradoxes of creative people in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discover and Invention

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Nick Cave, asking to not be considered for MTV award, 1996

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MUSE IS A DELICATE ONE AT THE BEST OF TIMES AND I FEEL THAT IT IS MY DUTY TO PROTECT HER FROM INFLUENCES THAT MAY OFFEND HER FRAGILE NATURE.

SHE COMES TO ME WITH THE GIFT OF SONG AND IN RETURN I TREAT HER WITH THE RESPECT I FEEL SHE DESERVES — IN THIS CASE THIS MEANS NOT SUBJECTING HER TO THE INDIGNITIES OF JUDGEMENT AND COMPETITION. MY MUSE IS NOT A HORSE AND I AM IN NO HORSE RACE AND IF INDEED SHE WAS, STILL I WOULD NOT HARNESS HER TO THIS TUMBREL — THIS BLOODY CART OF SEVERED HEADS AND GLITTERING PRIZES. MY MUSE MAY SPOOK! MAY BOLT! MAY ABANDON ME COMPLETELY!

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

The labor of writing touches every point of the body. When the book is finished, it's as if you had been rudely searched, and you desire only to regain integrity, to return to being the person you usually are, in occupations, in thoughts, in language, in relationships. The work is public: in it, there is everything we have to say.

 

Adrienne Rich, "Twenty-One Love Poems" IX

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key… Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.

Dwight Morrow to his son, Dwight Jr., 1925 | The Rotarian

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, 18 Apr 1938 - Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration.

Djuna Barnes to Emily Coleman, 1960 - The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.