Just as some people enjoy collecting rocks, baseball cards or stamps, I enjoy collecting quotes.
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I can teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. - Audre Lorde
There is, in fact, no teaching without learning. - Paulo FreireIt is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings in science. - Carl Sagan
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming. - Goethe
You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love. - Julia Child
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. - George Santayana
Work is love made visible. - Kahlil Gibran
It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take it up. - The Talmud
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. - Gloria Steinem
We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own. - Cesar Chavez
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. - Abraham Maslow
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge. - Confucious
Homo faber needs homo ludens—man-the-player makes a better man-the-maker. - Stewart Brand
But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrads, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. - bell hooks
I believe that the school must represent life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. - John Dewey
See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training. - Miyamoto Mushashi
The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men’s thinking about themselves. - Malcolm X
If you set your bar at ‘amazing’ it’s awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn’t going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you’ve created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that’s where you are. - Seth Godin
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. - C. S. Lewis
The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge. - Orson Scott Card
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save some money…but thats a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life … you can change it and mold it, thats maybe the most important thing.
To shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it and make your mark upon it. I think thats very important and however you learn that–once you learn it–you’ll want to change life and make it better, because its kinda messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. - Steve Jobs
Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world. - David McCullough Jr.
The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. - Carl Sagan
The best writing is rewriting. - E. B. White
Focusing is about saying no. - Steve Jobs
I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world - E. B. White
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. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. - Bertrand Russell
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. - George Bernard Shaw
Because I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other. The degree of courage of past or present union leaders is beside the point; all that matters for the argument is that they're the same. But if you want to please people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You're always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality.
Most writers do. Most writers write to persuade, if only out of habit or politeness. But I don't write to persuade; I write to figure out. I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader. - Paul Graham
From the time that I was 6 years old I had the mania of drawing the form of objects. As I came to be 50 I had published an infinity of designs; but all that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and every line, shall be instinct with life — and I ask all those who shall live as long as I do to see if I have not kept my word. - Katsushika Hokusai
I was never insane except upon occasion when my heart was touched. - Edgar Allen Poe
What nobody tells people who are beginners – and I really wish someone had told this to me ... is that 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, and 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 awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through. - Ira Glass
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
