“You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing”
— Sufi proverb
Tag: Quote
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She Decided
“Her nervous system had been through so much. She decided to spend the rest of her life calming the inflammation. Thoughts, feelings, memories, behavior, relations. She soothed it all with deep, Loving breaths and gentle practices. The softer she became with herself, the softer she became with the world, which became softer with her. She birthed a new generational cycle: Peace.”
— Dr. Jaiya John, Fragrance After Rain
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To Take the Measure
“To take the measure of something does not guarantee that we will understand its meaning, in fact, it may very well prevent us from doing so.”
— L.M. Sacasas, ”Whose Time? Which Temporality?”
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Nothing Happens
“What happens when you die? Well, we’re not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
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Uncomfortable, but Not Dangerous
“These thoughts are uncomfortable, but not dangerous,”
— Debra Kissen, How to Stop Feeling Anxious Right Now
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Stay with the Difficult Problem
“The system doesn’t stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It’s conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the things that’s making the unpleasant feeling.”
— David Bohm
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Think of the Person
“When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
— Vietnamese proverb
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Facts and Poetry
Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’”
— Jean Frémon, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Gloves”
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Me/Not Me
“I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
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The Greater the Wave
“The power of an ocean wave is directly related to the speed and duration of the wind that sets it in motion, and to the ‘length of its fetch,’ or the distance from its point of origin. The longer the fetch, the greater the wave. Nothing can stop these long waves. They become visible only at the end, when they rise and break; for most of their fetch the surface of the ocean is undisturbed.”
— Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (via Bryce Wilner)
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The Foolishness of God
“We desperately need the foolishness of God.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet (via Csaba Osvath)
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Thirteen
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
— George Orwell, 1984
Lisa Marie Blair 