Robert Maurer

When the midbrain is engaged by the repetitive movement involved in many crafts, the temporal lobe is unable to focus on worry or stress. The cortex - which controls conscious thought - becomes quiet and peaceful.

From This is Your Brain on Crafts, Martha Stewart Living, Nov 2012

Adelle Davis

We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are.

-From Let's Get Well

Sister Joan Chichester

I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

from Bill Moyers' show, Nov 2004

Carl Sagan

What an astonishing thing a book is. It is 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. [...] 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. Books are proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Shinichi Suzuki

To reason whether one has talent or not is to no avail. Abandon these thoughts, and use your own power to create talent.

from Nurtured by Love: A New Approach to Education. 1969, p 47.

John Daniel

A Prayer among Friends

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. May we see with clarity,
may we seek a vision
that serves all beings, may we honor
the mystery surpassing our sight,
and may we hold in our hands
the gift of good work
and bear it forth whole, as we
were borne forth by a power we praise
to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love. 

"A Prayer among Friends" by John Daniel, from Of Earth.
© Lost Horse Press, 2012.

Gretchen Reynolds

Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

As reported by Gretchen Reynolds in "Get Up, Get Out, Don't Sit", NY Times, 10/17/2012

Miss Piggy

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. 

Lily Tomlin

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Ed Sullivan

If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.

LBJ

When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.

Jens Voigt Facts

Once the CSC team bus broke down and Jens Voigt had to push it. French police pulled them over and detained the team for more than hour before letting Jens go with just a speeding ticket.

Heather McHugh

I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually.

Roger Housden

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regime we follow, no matter which self-help guru or meditation practice we follow, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of human experience.

A hundred years from now, there will be all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind. No you or me. Gone, and who knows where, if anywhere.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitation, feeling our soon-not-to-be-hereness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here now. That is the brilliance of the human design plan; the built-in "defect" is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us. Better to taste this gritty, imperfect life we have than to defer it to some more perfect future that will never come.

From Perfectly Imperfect article.

DK

It's only two layers, but I packed it with chicken.