Quotes--Food-for-Thought

I've been collecting quotes for over thirty years, things people have said that are wise, inspiring, thought-provoking, or humorous that have had a nurturing and sustaining

effect on my life and at times helped make it seem like it's worth the effort, or at least

got me through the day. Don't assume I live up to them, but they remind me of how I

want to try to think and live, giving me a direction I want to move toward. This page is dedicated to those little bon mots with the hope that some may serve others the way

they have me.

Every loss of control is an invitation to surrender, and it is only in surrender that we break out of our stories to contact a deeper

truth — about ourselves, about the world, about the interchange between the two that we call reality.

Maria Popova

It is the nature of the mind to live in the confines of its ideas until

you encounter something never imagined, some great profusion of

the heart that suddenly enlarges reality and tasks you with being

wholly alive.

Maria Popova, An Almanac of Birds

Pirin was named after the old divinity of thunder and fertility, Perun,

who is covered in dragon scales. I can see why humans worshipped mountains when they wandered over nine mountains with their flocks. Thunder Peak is the original cathedral. When Notre Dame burns,

Thunder Peak is here every morning. . .

The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting

for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love. . .

Now . . . I understand what it’s like to have seen something so true and beautiful, you want everyone to be touched by it. Saved, even.

Bulgarian poet and writer Kapka Kassabova

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but

there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Ursula Le Guin

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so

did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted

and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often

begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula Le Guin

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and

get more stuff.

George Carlin

Social learning — this jungle gym for training the plasticity of being

we call adaptation — may be the lever by which we lifted ourselves

up from the flatland of survival to the mountain of civilization, the key

that liberated us from the prison of our destiny as predators to

become poets.

Maria Popova

Indeed, nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent — baboons,

crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans — are big-brained social

generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.

Jonathan Meiberg

Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s

one who asks the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

To deny weaknesses is to be victimized by them and caught up

in lies.

Wallace Stegner

What these men were describing, I realized, was a pattern of path

breaking common to all living things: One caterpillar finds a new leaf,

and ten more follow its trail. By the time the eleventh arrives, the leaf

has been chewed down to its skeleton, and so the eleventh caterpillar grows hungry and sets off in a new direction. The same principle

applies to foraging ants and grazing herds, to fashion trends and stock markets, to traffic-clogged roads and eroded hiking paths.

Robert Moor, On Trails

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.

Indian proverb