“Take interest, I implore you, in those sacred dwellings which are designated by the expressive term: laboratories. Demand that they be multiplied, that they be adorned. These are the temples of the future – temples of well-being and of happiness. There it is that humanity grows greater, stronger, better.”

— Louis Pasteur 3 months ago

“Wir sollen immer der Fischer sein, das der Netz benutzt.
Und niemals ein Fisch, der vom Netz gefangen wird.”

“We should always be the fisherman using the net, and never the fish that is caught by the net.”

- Harald Lesch 4 months ago

“The rise of Christianity and other religious movements in the Roman Empire is an example of a new gossamer spreading over a rotten civilization; though outwardly emperors and armies continued to give orders as though nothing had changed, individuals, feeling that official institutions were ceasing to be relevant to their needs, sought their consolations from each other.”

- Theodore Zeldin 4 months ago

“Wer fremde Sprechen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.”

“He who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 4 months ago

“It is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca 4 months ago

“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man – and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”

- Wallaace Stevens 4 months ago

“The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.”

- Joseph Addison 4 months ago

“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

- William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951) 4 months ago

“Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.”

- Neil Gaiman 4 months ago

“An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions, and be skeptical.”

- Bill Moyers 4 months ago

“If, while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, chances are that we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea we will be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future – and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh 4 months ago

“I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.”

- Lily Tomlin 4 months ago

“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

- John Ruskin 4 months ago

“The elites that mostly run today’s industrial societies, like their equivalents in every other human society, have a deeply conservative streak under whatever surface layer of fashionable radicalism may be popular at any given time. They have the positions of influence that they do because they have the educations, hold the opinions, and think the thoughts that their peers, and more particularly the immediately prior generation of their peers, considered suitable to their roles. In a society that’s more or less sustainable, this is a powerful source of stability; in one that’s stumbled into an unsustainable human ecology, these same pressures for elite conformity can make it next to impossible for anyone in charge to think about the world in any other way than the one that’s making disaster inevitable.”

- John Michael Greer 4 months ago

“When people start to get routinely locked up for dissenting opinions; when whole swaths of the population sink into starvation; when eco-catastrophe is finally upon us, full force: Who will be responsible? The American government, or the “innocent” citizens who kept it in power? Will ignorance, or even stupidity, be enough of an excuse?”

- Morris Berman 5 months ago

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

- Bertrand Russell 5 months ago

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

- Michelangelo Buonarroti

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”

- Leonardo da Vinci 5 months ago

“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

- Andy Warhol 5 months ago

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”

- Robert Louis Stevenson 5 months ago

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”

- George Eliot 5 months ago

“If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your like.”

- Leo Tolstoy

_{Thanks to Gretchen Rubin}5 months ago

“Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”

- Garrison Keillor 5 months ago

“A man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“Nobody ever lives their lives all the way up except bull-fighters.”

- Ernest Hemingway

The rules are very simple: man the player is born; life the game will kill him.”

- Earl Rovit 5 months ago

“I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that Source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.”

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

_{In memory of Kate Mitchell.}5 months ago

“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”

- William Edward Hartpole Leckie

_{Thanks to Gretchen Rubin.}5 months ago

“The greatest menace to our civilization is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness – each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked – each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred.”

- Herbert Butterfield 5 months ago

“You know, there are definite limits to always barreling forward, and taking no heed of the past. There will come a time when that won’t work, and we’ll have to check out the used parts bin, and recover some of the stuff we cavalierly threw away.”

- Gary Snyder 5 months ago

“The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.”

- Elbert Hubbard 6 months ago

“We live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.”

- Chris Hedges 11 months ago

“We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power, that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that makes thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.”

- Chris Hedges 11 months ago