Bill Clinton

[T]oo many of us spend too much time worrying about advancement or personal gain at the expense of effort. We might fail, but we need to get caught trying.

Charles M. Blow

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/liberty-and-justice-for-all/

Harry S. Truman

You don't set a fox to watching chickens just because he has a lot of
experience in the hen house.

David Hume

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking,
is my supreme happiness.

He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more
excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

via Maestro Flatt

Regarding Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony: "The 'storm' isn't about the weather."

--as quoted by Maestro Flatt at 3/30/12 Denver philharmonic concert

Annie Murphy Paul

It [reading fiction] is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills.... [I]ndividuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study...found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind.

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

--"Your Brain on Fiction," New York Times, March 17, 2012

Kahlil Gibran

Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?

Ring Lardner

He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.

Bill Watterson

A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.

 

Wallace Stegner

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Eknath Easwaran

Minimizing self-will is minimizing distractions.

(from 4/5/1980 talk)

Edward Hoagland

Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live
on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind
best appreciated if most days are the same.

Sir J. Stephen

Every man has in himself a continent of undiscovered ability. Happy is he who acts as the Columbus to his own soul.

Thomas A Kempis and Eknath Easwaran

Wherever you go, you will always bear yourself about with you, and so you will always find yourself.
 - Thomas A. Kempis

There is only one way to get a real vacation: get as far away from the ego as possible. Worrying about your problems all the time makes for misery with a capital M. For getting away from misery, I recommend this "economy plan": do not feed your ego and your problems, with your attention. They will soon lose weight.
 - Eknath Easwaran

George Bernard Shaw and Eknath Easwaran

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
  – George Bernard Shaw

All of us have tasted the freedom and happiness that self-forgetfulness brings. In watching a good game of tennis or becoming engrossed in a novel, the satisfaction comes not so much from what we are watching or reading as from the act of absorption itself. For that brief span, our burden of personal thoughts is forgotten. Then we find relief, for what lies beneath that burden is a still, clear state of awareness.

The scientist or the artist absorbed in creative work is happy because she has forgotten herself in what she is doing. But nowhere will you find personalities so joyous, so unabashedly lighthearted, as those who have lost themselves in love for all. That is the joy we glimpse in Saint Francis or Mahatma Gandhi. To look at the lives of men and women like these is to see what joy means.

  – Eknath Easwaran