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“You don’t play against opponents; you play against the game of basketball.”
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“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” —
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“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’” —
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“What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.” —
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“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the ‘divine madness,’ to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.” — (via Cody Swift and Riverstyx Foundation)
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“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.” —
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“You’re 90% done. Congratulations! You only have 50% left.”
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Autobiography in Five Short Chapters Chapter One I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter Two I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place. But, it isn’t my fault. It still takes me a long time to get out. Chapter Three I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in…It’s a habit…but, my eyes are open. I know where I
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“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do is turn you into a son of a bitch.” —
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“‘What is the secret of your serenity?’ Said the Master, ‘Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.’” —
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“If you can’t tell what you desperately need, it’s probably sleep.” — (@kevin2kelly)
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“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” — , The Left Hand of Darkness
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“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.” —
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“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.” —
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“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” —
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“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.” —
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My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here, which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes
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“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” —
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“‘Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the
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“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing. … The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.” —
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“The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your inner enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all that you encounter.” — , founder of aikido (Source: The Art of Peace). Great reminder to start with the person in the mirror
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“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” — , East of Eden
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“The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy.” — , Optimism
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“The road to hell is not paved with good intentions. It is paved with lack of intention.” — from Gabor, start here.
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“Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never receive.” — (hat tip to Mark Goulston)
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“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” — , theoretical physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965
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“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.” — , Letter to John Quincy Adams dated January 19th, 1780
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“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” —
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“It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself, and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve. If the mind is petty, small, narrow, limited, however great and complex the problem may be, the mind approaches that problem in terms of its own pettiness.” —
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“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” — (Thank you to Terry Crews for sharing this one.)
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“That’s L.A. They worship everything and they value nothing.” — in La La Land, played by Ryan Gosling Have a wonderful weekend, all. Much love to you and yours, Tim ----------------------------------------------------------------- P.S. Deal of the Week — Athletic Greens. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and didn’t get paid to do so. I foc
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“I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” — From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
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“It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling,
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“Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.” —
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“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehen
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“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.” —
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“Antidotes to Fear of Death” Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars. Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp. Sometimes, instead, I stir myself Into a universe still young, Still warm as blood: No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form. And sometime it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones: To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls,
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“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these t
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“How shall I live? I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars. This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so
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“It is my belief that the next 1,000 unicorns—companies that have a market valuation over a billion dollars—won’t be a search engine, won’t be a media company, they’ll be businesses developing green hydrogen, green agriculture, green steel, and green cement.” — , CEO and chairman of BlackRock. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with ~$9.46 trillion USD in assets under management.
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The Laughing Heart your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you. — Charles Bukowski(Find a video of Tom Waits reading this poem here.)
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“Wild Geese” by . Take a few minutes and read this again. It’s worth the reminder. And if that’s too highbrow for ya, I’m also reading Pornhub Insights’ “2021 Year in Review,” which shares analytics like unusual search density in each US state. Louisiana is my favorite.
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“Movements are what take five or ten percent of people and make them decisive—because in a world where apathy rules, five or ten percent is an enormous number.” —
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“MDMA is the reason my son has a father instead of a folded flag.” — (R) Jon Lubecky (@jonlubecky) This quote is at the end of a recent, short video from The Today Show led by Savannah Guthrie (@savannahguthrie): “New research shows how psychedelic drug can help people with PTSD.” To learn more, read “Veterans Have Become Unlikely Lobbyists in Push to Legalize Psychedelic Drugs,” which was published at nearly the same time in The New York Times. People on the right and left don’t agree on much, but this is one area where we can find common ground with good data. Take a look at thes
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“If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” — William Morris(Related: my interview with Marie Kondo)
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“I learned this from the amazing @kylemaynard years ago, and I’ve probably used it every week since. Removing 7 gives you far better signal on everything. 7 is the most common default and tells you little; conversely, 6 is barely passing and 8 is a strong endorsement.” (Twitter thread)
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“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.” — Tim: Question for the writers out there: Do you agree or disagree with this? Why or why not?
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“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.'” —
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“It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.” — (Thank you to Maria Popova for introducing me to this quote.)
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“Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.” —
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Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. — “Lost” by David Wagoner(Huge thanks to Jerry Colonna for sharing t
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“Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.” — Salvador Dalí(For more than 100 Dalí quotes, see this.)
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“‘No one is useless in this world,’ retorted the Secretary, ‘who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.’” — , Our Mutual Friend
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“Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” —
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“What is success? It is an inner and indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie within ourselves. We must hold them firmly—deep within us.” —
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“You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, ‘What if...?’” — , “Where do you get your ideas?”
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“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” ― : “THE CASE FOR THE... BRONCOS”
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“Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.” —
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“Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You have been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.” — of a longer poem, as found in the first bullet, “In The Light Of Dying Stars.”]
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“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.” —