quotes

“After you’ve done a ting the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.” Alfred Edward Perlman

“Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing." Sydney Smith

“The conviction that we think in our sleep has been around far longer than neurophysiology or psychoanalysis.'Let me sleep on it' is not always a way of postponing a decision; it may also be a recourse to the folk wisdom that knows there is more than one way to think about a problem.” A. Alvarez

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.” Ernest Hemingway

“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.” Carl Schurz, general and politician (1829-1906)

“What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.” Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

“Language always tells long stories if we listen; it's littered with the ways we look at things.” Michael Wood, American academic and writer, The New York Times, May 21, 1995

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)

“There is often more wisdom to be found at the edges of life than in its middle. Life threatening illness may shuffle our values like a deck of cards. Sometimes a card we have been carrying on the bottom of our deck for most of our lives turns out to be the top card, the thing that really matters. Having watched people sort their cards and play their hands in the presence of death for many years, I would say that rarely is the top card perfection or possessions or even power. Most often the top card is love.” Rachel Remen

“Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.” Joseph Campbell

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” Albert Einstein

“Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.” Iara Gassen

“People who never get carried away should be.” Malcolm S. Forbes

“In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; A grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.” James Russell Lowell

“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother” Albert Einstein

“The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We have always had storytellers and makers of fiction since the days of the cave-man. There is an eternal impulse in human nature to enliven the actual working life by the invention of tales of another kind of life, recognizable by its likeness to ordinary life, but so arranged that things happen more dramatically and pleasingly — which indeed is the world in a glorified and idealized form.” John Buchan, Scottish writer and politician, The Novel and Fairy Tale, 1931

“Adapting to technology is a matter of confidence; one's true willingness to explore and learn is sufficient to be 'in on it.'” Andrew Niculescu

“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” Marcel Pagnol

“The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.” Henry Boye

“The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.” Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)