I’ve never been a classic diarist. Recording quotes, poems, book passages, and dialogue has always been my own way of journaling to understand my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Three decades later and the result is near-eidetic memory for quotation and citation. It’s my version of a party trick. I continue to update this page as new quotes are added to my personal log.
“We see things as we are, not as they are.”
“A problem well put is half solved.”
“The scientific revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.”
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man that hated and this was an immutable law.”
“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
“When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.”
“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would ‘choose knowing rather than being known.’ I had always thought it was the other way around.”
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.”
“Between stimulus and response there is a space.”
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
“Everyone is familiar with the slogan ‘The personal is political’ — not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives.”
“Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.”
“If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.”
“’Environments inhabit us,’ Varda said. These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we’re made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves.”
“To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”
“It’s a difficult thing to climb to the top of the ladder of success only to realize when you get there that your ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall.”
“I’ve never met a bored person who wasn’t, themselves, boring.”
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except the memory of the smell of smoke and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
“The job of the newspaper is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.”
“Life is growth, and the more we travel, the more truth we can understand. Understanding the things that surround us is the best preparation to understand the things that lie beyond.”
We have long been uneasy about our membership in the animal kingdom, preferring to focus on the traits that distinguish us from other species. The built environment mirrors this anxiety, carving out ample space for our cultural aspirations while ignoring our biological needs… Our cities are designed to make us feel separate from nature, when in fact we are a part of nature. For most of human evolution — eighty thousand generations — nature was not a place we went but a place we lived.”
“Remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”
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.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?…Well here we are…trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
“Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. 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.”
“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.”
“The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there – so there the mountain stays.”
“I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
“An act of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically inseparable from it.”
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.'”
“There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.”
“You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Withdrawing from it does not make it go away.”
“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.”
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
“We usually think of breakthroughs as ecstatic moments that elevate us from a lower level to a higher. And they do. But there’s a paradox. In the moment, an epiphany feels like hell…an epiphany trashes us. It exposes us and leaves us naked. We see ourselves plain and it’s not a pretty picture. The essence of epiphanies is the stripping away of self-delusion.”
“In liberal democracies, the border has a unique power to transmute ordinary needs into criminal desires.”
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
“Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
“Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.”
“Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest people. The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some, and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more than human beings.”
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
“Never to have failed is not a sign of merit but of fragility; it means your fears have kept you from doing it, becoming what you might have. ‘Fail better,’ Samuel Beckett famously wrote. If your standards are as high as they should be, you will fail again and again.”
“I cherish foreignness, personally and internationally.”
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them.”
“The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o’the wisp, the Jack o’lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There’s no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life.”
“You can’t generalize about pain. Each kind of pain has its own characteristics. To rephrase Tolstoy’s famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.”
“I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense.”
“Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them — inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Differences in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
“To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.”
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
“Know the rules well so you can break them effectively.”
“The idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics — the idea that politics is something one chooses…rather than something we have whether we choose it or not…is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling — and the stunted readership it demands — asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.”
“If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
“The very term profit cries out for redefinition, for the stock market defines as profitable every kind of destruction and lacks terms for valuing cultures, diversities, or long-term well-being, let alone happiness, beauty, freedom, or justice.”
“A mind is like a parachute – it doesn’t work unless it’s open.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
“In a world as myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren’t the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.”
“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.”
“Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”
“Simplicity rarely loses to complexity in battles in the public square.”
“If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
“For measurement to be meaningful, knowing the resolution is crucial and integral to the entire process.”
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.”
“This was one of the first ways I perceived power in another person…showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.”
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”
“The creative adult is the child who has survived.”
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea beneath us.”
“The truth is, of course, that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”
“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be treated and he will become as he can and should be.”
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
“No sport encourages the paradoxical impulses of meditative, in-the-moment focus and past-tense memorializing quite like mountain climbing…A mountain presents not just an invitation to climb it but also a provocation to represent that climb.”
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
“The difference between theory and practice is far greater in practice than in theory.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
“A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.”
“Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.”
“It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back.”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”
“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“What good is knowing unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from some place else… While science could be a source of and a repository for knowledge, the scientific world view is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion. It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature, fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more than human world…Contrasting with this is the scientific worldview…that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas. I maintain that the destructive lens… is not science itself but [this]… The illusion of dominance and control. The separation of knowledge from responsibility.”
“Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.”
“Doctors and scientists said breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.”
“One of the first effects of the hyper-democratization of data was to unmoor information from the context required to understand it.”
“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
“Facts are stubborn things but statistics are more pliable.”
“Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than 200 years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650 — very promising, very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I’ll wait awhile.”
“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of a lack of wisdom.”
“To know and not to do is really not to know.”
“If you don’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick every day.”
“Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
“Everyone gets the experience, some get the lesson.”
“There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also… There is another view of life that holds wherever the crowd is, there is untruth.”
“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.”
“In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends. If we knew each other’s secrets, what comforts we should find.”
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
“I commend to you, fellow physician, the pragmatically useless treatment called poetry, whereby we might leave our patients less alone when our medicine leaves us all alone.”
“[How to think] doesn’t simply mean how to solve an equation or construct a study to analyze a text — or even acquiring the ability to work across the disciplines. It means developing the habit of healthy skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means not learning to take things for granted so you can reach your own conclusions. Before you can learn, you have to unlearn.”
“Inside the word emergency is emerge; from emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”