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 make the mistake of assuming 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.

There is a possibility of your having a decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a man of you.

Sherwood Anderson

You and I don’t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our

time or not—No matter what failure or success we may have—we

will not know—But we can keep our integrity—according to our

own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form.

Georgia O’Keeffe

When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus.

Turkish proverb

To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear

and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.

Ocean Vuong

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living. Virginia Woolf

In America, we have this myth that capitalists like competition. But no capitalist wants competition. What all companies want is monopoly.

Bryant Simon

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Plutarch

There are hundred-year-old trees, but there is no hundred-year-old

power.

Saying of Karakachan shepherds in Bulgaria

Today we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere aesthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself,

but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being.

Oswald Spengler

The creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality . . . All other realities are derived from and indirectly revealed

by it, actually with the artificial aid named science.

Carl Jung

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