Quote horde
A regularly updated assortment of quotations loosely related to post-critical thinking and healthcare
A horde:
A large group or crowd; a swarm: synonym: crowd
A nomadic tribe or group
Last updated 6th May 2024 - most recent additions at the top
‘I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time’ - Isaac Asimov
‘The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something’ - Simone Weil
‘I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it’ - Charles Bukowski
‘Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way’ - Vincent van Gogh
‘My strength lies solely in my tenacity’ - Louis Pasteur
‘I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may’ - Vincent van Gogh
‘What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war’ - Simone Weil
‘The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born’ - Nikola Tesla
‘Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive’ - Howard Thurman
‘Thoughts have power; thoughts are energy’ - Susan L. Taylor
‘I do not carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think’ - Albert Einstein
‘Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve’ - Karl Popper
‘Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful’ - Vincent van Gogh
‘Everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history’ - Kelly Hayes
‘Hate is a lack of imagination’ - Graham Greene
‘Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can’ - Arthur Ashe
‘Whatever we know is provisional’ - Priya Natarajan
‘There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation’ - William James
‘This is how philosophers should greet each other: ‘Take your time!’’ - Ludwig Wittgenstein
‘Theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth’ - Adrienne Rich
‘The greatest enemy of learning is knowing’ - John C. Maxwell
‘Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt’ - Graham Greene
‘A writer, if they are doing their job properly, is always a heretic’ - Richard Flanagan
‘Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble’ - Maxwell Perkins
‘I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them’ - Carl Friedrich Gauss
‘The creative power of the oppressed will always exceed that of the oppressor’ - Kelly Hayes
‘I only want to know the facts of physics. The theories I will make up’ - Leo Sziland
‘I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort’ - Clarice Lispector
‘Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one’ - Parmenides
‘Design your life to minimize reliance on willpower’ - B.J. Fogg
‘What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?’ - Italo Calvino
‘I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it’ - Katherine Anne Porter
‘Who hasn't asked themselves, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?’ - Clarice Lispector
‘At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being’ - Simone Weil
‘Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away’ - Hakuin Ekaku
‘Whenever I find myself arguing for something with great passion, I can be certain I'm not convinced’ - Hugh Prather
‘To be free of belief and unbelief is my religion’ - Omar Khayyam
‘What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek’ - Anthony Doerr
‘What an analysis sees as a marginal, uninteresting, or parasitic case is oftentimes the skeleton key to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of that theory’ - Jeffrey Nealon
‘This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale’ - Nikos Kazantzakis
‘I never practiced the guitar, I just played it. I picked it up in the morning and put it down at night. I didn’t consider that practice. I was just expressing myself, and it happened to be on the guitar’ - Rick Deitrick
‘“Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass”’ - Anthony Doerr
‘Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon’ - Susan Ertz
‘Year by year, the monkey's mask reveals the monkey’ - Matsuo Bashō
‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about’ - Wendy Mass
‘Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it’ - Roger Scruton
‘If you are resisting something, you are feeding it. Any energy you fight, you are feeding. If you are pushing something away, you are inviting it to stay’ - Michael Singer
‘Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for’ - Immanuel Kant
‘And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them’ - Amanda Palmer
‘Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected’ - John Lewis Gaddis
‘Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise, instead, seek what they sought’ - Matsuo Bashō
‘Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays’ - Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies’ - Nicolás Gómez Dávila
‘The things that count in life are the things that can't be counted’ - Johnny Mercer
‘When we set out to change things, we don't pay enough attention to what we want to leave unchanged’ - Dietrich Dörner
‘Learn to shake yourself loose from what the world believes is the only reality’ - Neville Goddard
‘The guy who gives you the most trouble is usually the least talented’ - Trevor Horn
‘Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying 'I will try again tomorrow’ - Mary Anne Radmacher
‘Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see’ - John Cage
‘Be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done’ - Austin Kleon
‘Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece’ Ralph Charell
‘To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator’ - Maria Montessori
‘Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise’ - Thornton Wilder
‘Someone who thinks up a new theory is the last person who should be trusted with the job of testing it’ - Judith Rich Harris
‘Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe’ - Plotinus
‘The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up’ - Paul Valéry
‘The universe only gives me what I’m ready for, and only when I’m ready’ - Anita Moorjani
‘It's always tempting to do good at someone else's expense’ - Frédéric Bastiat
‘We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude’ - Bertrand Russell
‘No wise man ever wished to be younger’ - Jonathan Swift
‘You geometers… nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or small that is - Seneca
‘It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible - Samuel Johnson
‘Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because I pity you? No; not a bit’ - Theodore Roosevelt
‘All things are full of labour’ - Ecclesiastes
‘The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become’ - Amit Singhal
‘The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by deprecation of the present. The present contains all that there is’ - Alfred North Whitehead
‘You can never be wise unless you love reading’ - Samuel Johnson
‘Writing is painful as a life. I feel that even after decades. Doesn’t get easier, which surprised me. The yearning and failing parts don’t get easier. And then there are the miraculous times when fluency is effortless. Or even the times of just being absorbed deeply. Can’t think of anything better. I regret being unable to occupy that state constantly but to be there at all seems a marvel beyond all others’ - Louise Gluck
‘Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects’ - Rudolf Arnheim
‘The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay’ - Robert Breault
‘When everyone leaves you it's loneliness you feel, when you leave everyone else it's solitude’ - Alfred Polgar
‘A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own’ - Rudolf Arnheim
‘But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless’ - Olga Tokarczuk
‘We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal’ - Robert Breault
‘A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices - William James
‘Observations always involve theory’ - Edwin Hubble
‘Most writers of books have only one story to tell; it is the one wrapped around a piece of emotional wisdom the author has made his or her own. If the writers are any good at what they do, the story deepens with each book that is written. If they are less than good, the story will simply repeat itself at the same level at which it originally took shape. In time, the work of the better writer will come to feel enriched by the clear renewal of lived experience, while the work of the lesser one will come to seem ever more reduced. I hold this truth to be self-evident for the writers of fiction and nonfiction alike’ - Vivian Gornick
‘Death twitches my ear; “Live,” he says... “I'm coming”’ - Virgil
‘Don't let anything poison your individuality. Break away & look in, not outward’ - Rodney Mullen
‘If you want to know the truth about the emperor’s clothes, don’t ask the tailors’ - Judith Harris
‘It is not just do do do. It is not just be be be. It is do be do be do’ - Amit Goswami
‘In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down’ - Katherine Boo
‘Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy’ - Gaur Gopal Das
‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’ - Anton Chekhov (tr. from Russian by Lilith Regan)
‘There is no method except yourself’ - Harold Bloom
‘Radical simply means grasping things at the root’ - Angela Y. Davis
‘Freedom is the dream you dream while putting thought in chains again’ - Giacomo Leopardi
‘Ideas are the root of creation’ - Ernest dimnet
““Old age is the world where illness and health intermingle and blur, they become indistinguishable from one another, like vitality and neurosis.” Which is why people also say to somebody older than themselves that they “are in good shape” without knowing what they are saying. In fact, this older person has to fight hard for their good, effective time and has to mix this together with the appalling weak times to make a palatable broth for themselves and others to look at” - Italo Svevo quoted by Maria Lassnig.
"Kindness is the power that moves us to support and heal someone who offers nothing in return" - Lewis B. Smedes
“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a 'circle of certainty' within which reality is also imprisoned" - Paulo Freire
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work” - Gustave Flaubert
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing" - Arundhati Roy
"And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be" - Peter O’Toole
“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves” - Norbert Wiener
“A frequently circulated, probably apocryphal, story tells of Judith Butler being challenged by a graduate student at a session of the Modern Languages Association annual conference circa 1990. Poststructuralist social analysis of the sort Butler offered was notoriously complex and very influential. The student objected to Butler’s use of inaccessible theoretical vocabulary on the grounds that it excluded many readers in a manner not consistent with feminist ethics. Butler’s allegedly impatient response was “Don’t give theory to the patriarchy” Link
“The arrow doesn’t find the target; the target draws the arrow” - Matthew McConaughey
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” - Gilles Deleuze
“Be happy for those who are happy,be compassionate toward those who are unhappy, be delighted for those who are virtuous, and be indifferent toward the wicked” - Patañjali
“I always thought that an artist’s was the hardest life of all. Its rigour—not always apparent to an outside observer—is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he has set himself to is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder” - Lucian Freud
“When people tell you what’s wrong [with something you’ve written] they’re often right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re always wrong” - Bill Hader
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life” - Annie Dillard
“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding” - Steven Sloman
“The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want” - Sarah Manguso
“The goal is always to find projects that offer a sense of freedom. Sometimes, you only get that in little bits… but I like that in each project I do, I can search for my idea of quality or find the context for a new definition of quality…; searching for your own idea of quality, a pursuit that requires freedom, for which you must advocate” - Patricia Urquiola
“Man is a part of nature and what he does is natural and can't be construed as tampering” - Robert Shea
“One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will be” - John Berryman
“I love having a problem I believe I might someday write my way out of” - Sarah Manguso
We never know how high we are,
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.
The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king - Emily Dickinson
"Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts" - Ernst Mayr
"If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules" - John Arden
These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked
of me -
Befriend them,
lest yourself in
Heaven
Be found a
Refugee - Emily Dickinson
“The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks” - Stephen Batchelor
"Thinking about the future will cause it to change" - Thomas Frey
"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work” - Khaled Hosseini
“With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life. There never was a person who could so easily be made happy. Especially someone who writes without ceasing, and moreover never anyone who has failed so persistently and senselessly amid such happiness” - Elias Canetti (tr. from German by Michael Hargraves)
"People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not" - Neil Postman
“How long do you take to knock off one of your pictures?
Oh, I knock off one possibly in a couple of days — one day to do the work, and another to finish it.
And that was the labour for which you asked two hundred guineas?
No; it was for the knowledge gained through a lifetime” - James Whistler to the Attorney General at the Ruskin libel trial, November 1878
“Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them” - Constantin Brancusi
“Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense” - Gretchen Rubin
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He (sic) builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination” - Fred Brooks
“To fall in love with someone's thoughts - the most intimate, splendid romance. / even / in the loneliest moments / I have been there / for myself” - Sanober Khan
“For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets” - Toni Morrison
“You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about” - William Deresiewicz
"Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial" - George Saunders
"Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system" - Mary Augusta Ward
"Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker" - Bram Stoker
"We look harder for flaws in a study when we don't agree with its conclusions" - Sharon Begley
“As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire” - Steven Kotler
“Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress” - Steve Grand
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm” - Willa Cather
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world” - John Muir
“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without [it], we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music” - Lewis Thomas
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking” - Joan Didion
“The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose” - Steve Grand
“if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park” - Gareth Klieber
“a memory is nothing / nothing is a memory” - Bernadette Mayer (from the poem “from The Covid Diary”)
"How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean" - Theodore Dreiser
"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock” - Ben Hecht
“I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. Ignore the authors who say, oh my god, what work, oh Jesus Christ, you know. No, to hell with that. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it, and do something else” - Ray Bradbury
"The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people" - Isabel Paterson
“If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded” - Mark Forsyth
“A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief”” -- Ben Hecht
“The best way to describe your total creative capacity is to say that for all practical purposes it is infinite” - George Leonard
“The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth” - Peter Turchi
“You dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon” - Lionel Shriver
“Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything” - Jon Mooallem
“…looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking in the radio for the announcer” - Alicia Ostriker, from the poem Q&A: Reality
“A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim” - Peter Turchi
“When we have finished describing the elephant, will we have an elephant” - Alicia Ostriker, from the poem Q&A: Reality
“My conviction is that education must be about thinking—not training a set of specific skills” - Scott Newstok
“Don’t let them slow you down. Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up” - Thomas Wolfe
"a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought" - Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Only that which can change can continue” - James Carse
"What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness" - Flann O'Brien
“Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns” - Edith Eger
“If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time” - Tom Peters
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers” - Thomas Pynchon
“I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. / But who would count eternity in days? / These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: / (I measure time by how a body sways). - Theodore Roethke, from the poem I knew a woman
“Omnia explorate meliora retinete” (explore everything; keep the best) - John Evelyn (1620-1706)
“The Infinite a / sudden Guest / Has been assumed / to be—But how can that / stupendous come / Which never went away?” - Emily Dickinson
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” - Rainer Maria Rilke
“Human nature is the same in all professions” - Laurence Sterne
“These amazing and often indispensable systems work so well and so quietly that we tend to be unaware of their existence” - David Macaulay
“There is a world of difference: the distance between habitable worlds. It is the space that is unbearable” - Claire Wahmanholm, from the poem Poem with No Children In It
“Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it” - Václav Havel
“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true” - Jean Baudrillard
“Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it / Knots tying threads to everywhere” - Lisel Mueller (from the poem Curriculum Vitae).
“I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think” - Vanessa Bell
"I know nothing, and I know least of all what I have found out myself. What does this mean? That I must find it out again? Or that it only has meaning when others rediscover it?" - Elias Canetti (tr. from German by John Hargraves).
“It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well” - John Steinbeck
"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves" - Confucius
“I’m pleased you find [my book] ‘likable’; but the more unlikable a book… the more it counts; the more laborious it is to take in the more it counts” - Italo Calvino
"In teaching, you do not want to COVER things, you want to UNCOVER them. The best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas" - Linus Pauling
"Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking" - Francis Crick
“This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition” - Friedrich Schelling
“Nobody has the last word” - Hans-Georg Gadamer
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” - John Muir
“Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits” - Michelle Obama
"The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered" - Oscar Wilde
“My colleague Steve Yablo once described teaching as “standup with low expectations.” He had in mind, I think, the undergraduate lecture. It has the form of the comedy special or Edinburgh show: holding the attention of an audience for 50 minutes with nothing but words. Anticipating boredom, students can be grateful for the feeblest of dad jokes” - Kieran Setiya
“I suspect I’m not alone among philosophers in finding colloquia almost universally frustrating: the speakers are more interesting than the conventional talk allows them to be. I tend to be impatient for the Q&A, a form much better suited to its purpose—like a roomful of hecklers, but they have to raise their hands, and the speaker has to invite the heckle” - Kieran Setiya
“[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one’s way of being through the act of writing” - Michel Foucault
“Ecology without class struggle is just gardening” - Chico Mendes
"Real change requires you to change what you do -- not just what you say you'll do” - adapted from "“Real change requires you to change your behavior-not just your attitude” - Phil Stutz
“In any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise” - Jon Gertner
“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself” - Mikhail Bakunin
“The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!” - Mikhail Bakunin
“Commonsense, though all very well for everyday purposes, is easily confused, even by such simple questions as ... when you feel a pain in the leg, where is the pain? If you say it is in your head, would it be in your head if your leg had not been amputated? If you say yes, then what reason have you for ever thinking you have a leg?” - Bertrand Russell
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones" - John Maynard Keynes
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe" - Abraham Lincoln
"Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them" - Alfred North Whitehead
“To achieve great things two things are needed; a plan, and not enough time” - Leonard Bernstein
“When it comes to professional opportunities, this is the best time to be alive in the history of humankind” - Gary Vaynerchuk
“Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology” - Alfred North Whitehead
“Thinking is a mode of practice in its own right, and practice thinks” - Erin Manning
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play” - Arnold Toynbee
“Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working” - Henri Matisse
“Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere, and not the things that tie you down” - Pico Iyer
"I am still trying to find a job / for which a simple machine isn't better suited" - C.D. Wright from the poem Personals
“When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder" - Richard Powers
“Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises” - Siddhartha Mukherjee
"Loneliness, then, may not be a lack of intimacy: it may in fact be a lack of embeddedness. We may, in fact, be utterly “seen and known” by our friends and family. But more than that, we want to be required, to be held taut in a web of interchange that is aware — by necessity — of our talents and our resources. We want to be held close, but for that closeness to be selfish on the other’s part. We want our closeness to be mutually beneficial, not merely a favor or an expression of generous love" link
“To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble” - Bill Watterson
“It’s good we have symphonies and music where there’s a development, but a waterfall doesn’t need an Act 1, 2, 3, then an outcome, and nor do the leaves on a tree in a storm” - Nils Frahm
“There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear” - Daniel C. Dennett
“In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time” - David Graeber
"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind" - Rebecca West
“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything he wants to read.” - Evelyn Waugh
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow” - Margaret Fuller
“In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy choice” - Richard Bach
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done” - Alan Turing
“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are” - Bertold Brecht
“Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true” - Rivka Galchen
“With confidence, you can reach truly amazing heights; without confidence, even the simplest accomplishments are beyond your grasp” - Jim Loehr
"Remember that if the devil | wants to kick somebody, he won't do it | with his horse's hoof | but with his human foot" From the poem Pig Roast by Tadeusz Róźewicz (tr. from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
“What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it” - Jennifer Egan
“[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering” - Jennifer Egan
"An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision" - Charles Babbage
“What you do not have you find everywhere” from poem Provision by W.S. Merwin
"If you're struggling with negative thoughts, achieving flow is probably the best medicine. Contrary to popular wisdom, forced positive thinking often makes things worse" - via How to be happy in Happiness
“Our thinking was limited by convention (the most subtle but oppressive dictator)” - Pip Williams
"The Kimbark studio complex remains my desired home. I am not there a lot these days but when I return it is always the place I want to be first. In this moment when it is reasonable to embrace a post-studio ethos, and perhaps, I am always making, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, nonetheless Kimbark is the anchor and altar of my life. The studio binds me to making, and when adjacent to a great problem of space or ideology or impulse, I can feel the spaces stand at attention, become warm in anticipation of the new thing and generously longing of my presence. I long for more time. Now that the spaces are distributed and several spaces at the same time function collectively as the studio, I am always consciously trying to create the right pre-conditions whereby art might happen alongside other things" Link