Monday, March 25, 2013

Dana Becker

Instead of thinking about stress as something outside us, it's now become integral to the self. So the problem of stress has become our own personal predicament to solve, and there's no dearth of advice about how to do this: eat more kale, get some therapy, take a yoga class. The message is: change yourself, change your lifestyle, or learn to adapt to the stress. Consider what it means to accept this way of thinking about stress. If women believe that it's our job to manage the stress of combining paid employment and family work, we're more likely to "de-stress" by putting more bath oil in the bath and less likely to work toward changing family-unfriendly workplace policies or to agitate for universal daycare.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Thomas Edison

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy -- sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. 

Monday, March 11, 2013

Heraclitus

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. 

Ezra Jack Keats

I love city life. All the beauty that other people see in country life, I find taking walks and seeing the multitudes of people.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Vilhelm Ekelund

To read fast is as bad as to eat in a hurry. 

Friday, December 28, 2012

Abraham Lincoln

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. 

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Maria Sanford

"...vehement and gusty, leonine, hale, and lusty." 

Maria Sanford was an educator born in 1836. She became one of the first female college professors in the country when she accepted a professorship of history at Swarthmore in 1871, though she migrated to the University of Minnesota in 1880. Sanford was the first woman to deliver a commencement speech at a university and was a frequent public speaker at a time when it was considered inappropriate for women to speak in public. She was known for her ability to project her voice to the back of any room. On her eightieth birthday, the University of Minnesota held an event to celebrate her long career, and someone recited a speech that described her with the phrase above. What a woman! 

Charles Darwin

It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.

--From his diary account of his trip to South America

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for. 

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Gustave Flaubert

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Brooks Atkinson

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Unknown

A joy shared is a joy doubled.

Unknown

Love is blind. Friendship is clairvoyant.

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