“He who cannot howl will not find his pack.”

—Charles Simic

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

—Henry David Thoreau

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning/ long enough. From now on, I'll be mad.

Rumi

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

Helen Keller

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

Rebecca Solnit

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”

— Albert Camus

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior. The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity. Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract, or a lack of sleep may have on mood. How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

To hurry pain is to leave a classroom still in session. To prolong pain is to miss the next lesson.

Yahia Lababidi

I ask my guides and ancestors to help me offer my most inspired largesse so as to serve the health and inspiration and liberation of the people whose lives I touch.

Rob Brezsny

We can’t continue in a world where our main forms of social connection are images and words on a screen and expect the humane aspects of real-life socializing to endure.

Anna Mercury

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by  Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long 

Charlie Chaplin’s first spoken role in the Dictator

It always seems like the hardest thing in the world until you do it. Then you will ask yourself why it took you so long to start.

Arthur W. Frank