“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke
“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
― Blaise Pascal
“There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.”
“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.”
“Cats are very wise beings. Only those humans know it who are wise themselves (and have had the pleasure of paying attention to a cat). It is rather unclear who is wiser, the wisest among humans or the wisest among cats, but it is altogether clear that an average cat is wiser than an average human. That tells us as much about humans as much about cats.”
― My orange cat
“There are a lot of ways to be a naughty child, but I think reading under your desk is the most exquisite. It’s a pretty radical act, taking responsibility and initiative for your own learning, setting your own curriculum. It was, I truly believe, the most punk thing you could do. And some of the shyest, quietest kids were my co-conspirators. …
Now that I’m an adult, I no longer have to read under the table. But I look back on it fondly. I am so proud of that recalcitrant child. If I could live my life over again, I would have disregarded the curriculum more brazenly. I would have brought more books to school, so that when one was confiscated I could’ve read another. And for the rest of my life, I’m always going to look for my fellow under-table readers. The kids with the twinkle in their eyes, burning with curiosity that refuses to be extinguished; not by authority, not by bureaucracy, not by anyone.”
“All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
“It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.
When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.”
― Samuel Ullman / Youth
“Gazing at this transfigured desert I remember the games of my childhood-the dark and golden park we peopled with gods; the limitless kingdom we made of this square mile never thoroughly explored, never thoroughly charted. We created a secret civilization where footfalls had a meaning and things a savor known in no other world.
And when we grow to be men and live under other laws, what remains of that park filled with the shadows of childhood, magical, freezing, burning? What do we learn when we return to it and stroll with a sort of despair along the outside of its little wall of gray stone, marveling that within a space so small we should have founded a kingdom that had seemed to us infinite — what do we learn except that in this infinity we shall never again set foot, and that it is into the game and not the park that we have lost the power to enter.”
― Antoine de Saint Exupery / Wind Sand, and Stars