My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — every day I’m learning something new.
Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.
our work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.
When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.
When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.
Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.
If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.
A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
Don’t believe everything you think. Thoughts are just that – thoughts.
While meditating we are simply seeing what the mind has been doing all along.
It is a powerful practice to be generous when you are the one feeling in need.
We have no idea what tomorrow will bring, but today is overflowing with potential.
You cannot control the results, only your actions.
We need never be bound by the limitations of our previous or current thinking, nor are we ever locked into being the person we used to be, or think we are.
Support the type of thinking that leads you to feeling good, peaceful & happy.
That’s why it’s called a practice. We have to practice a practice if it is to be of value.
The practice of lovingkindness can uplift us & relieve sorrow & unhappiness.
The more we genuinely care about others the greater our own happiness & inner peace.
Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.
That God should love me is more wonderful Than that I so imperfectly love him.
To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.
When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.
I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of and also because things are dying, things that you don’t have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing.
Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.
To fail to love is not to exist at all.
Memory holds together past and present, gives continuity and dignity to human life… the companion… the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel.
Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.
An attack on Public Education is an attack on Democracy.
Those who can’t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.
Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?
Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.
Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.
American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.
Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice.
The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.
Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than to be in bad company.
We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.
I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.
Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that.
Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can’t, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That’s why I don’t review books.
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.
Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.
What was our life like? I almost don’t remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.
Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.
The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, ‘Am I doing something that’s worthwhile?’ Because even if you fail at it, you know that it’s worth doing.
I’m trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that’s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.
Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting.
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.
The first task of the doctor is, political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.
Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Truth is not by nature free – nor error servile – but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.
Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?
I can’t help it when people are frightened,” says Merricat. “I always want to frighten them more.
I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.
So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…
I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.
We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.
