Quotes

A collection of quotes I like

Pay attention to how much time you spend CREATING vs WORRYING ABOUT RULES make your TRASH now so you can make your TREASURE tomorrow if you don’t, you’ll forever be wading through a sea of garbage.

From this post.

Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you ‐‐ how many you can make your own

Mortimer Adler

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; if you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

Emerson, Self Reliance

If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.

Linda Holmes, The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All GOing to Miss Almost Everything

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice

Jerry Garcia, on the Grateful Dead

They’re not the best at what they do — they’re the only ones that do what they do

Bill Graham, on the Grateful Dead

I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

Orwell, Why I Write

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

David Foster Wallace, *Roger Federer as Religious Experience

Use short sentences Use short first paragraphs Use vigorous english Be positive, not negative

Hemmingway