There are two things that are the mark of genius: one is non-stop buzzing in the brain, the other seeing the next move when there is no next move.   Niall Williams 

Why do we get married? To fill in some of the gaps.   ccs 

You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for.   Niall Williams  

Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.   Niall Williams 

We speak not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.   Oliver Sacks 

The path to victory is to win first, and then go to war.   Sun Tzu 

The trouble with politics is that it often comes down to who is the better liar.   ccs 

There is no true responsibility without awareness.   Gabor Maté 

The multiplication of laws undermines the rule of law.   James Madison 

Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite. What you do you must do on your own.   James Joyce 

The basic problem is that the federal government is careless with taxpayer money.   Charles Silver & David Hyman 

A political party is an organized attempt to get control of the government.   E. E. Schattschneider 

Attention is suffering's lesson. Stay alert, stay inquisitive. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.   Sarah Manguso 

Respect the reality that already exists.   ccs 

Time is eternity living dangerously.   John Moriarty 

May we all be our better selves most of the time.   ccs 

What I loved, aside from the work of gardening, was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to walking.   Olivia Laing  

Much of life boils down to finding the shortcut to the cheese.   Joseph T. Hallinan 

We don't learn from experience because we're not sure which experience to learn from.   Joseph T. Hallinan 

We are not atoms in a mindless universe but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create.   Charles Taylor 

Where else would the spirit be, but embedded in matter?   Anne Michaels 

The universe offers up, and we pass it along.   ccs 

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?   Anne Michaels 

Everyone has a relationship with death. Dying is the most ordinary thing you will ever do but also the most radical.   Sebastian Junger 

Prediction is the key to almost all human behavior.   Mary-Frances O'Connor 

Once distortions creep into our shared narratives, they can be incredibly difficult to root out.   Charan Ranganath 

Generosity is not transactional.   ccs 

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.   Emerson W. Pugh 

Don't feel you have to offer an opinion on something you don't know a lot about.   Perlmutter, Campbell, & MacCoun 

A person can go a long way with a narrow skill set.   David Bradley 

The earnest practice of friendship requires us to be rather better than most of the time we really are.   Joseph Epstein 

Life is the sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts.   Paul Valéry 

There is no such thing as atheism. The only choice we get is what to worship.   David Foster Wallace 

Loneliness obfuscates.   Giovanni Frazzetto 

Seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it's an active process of prediction and correction.   David Brooks 

Science doesn't unweave the rainbow.   Helen de Cruz 

...because it matters.   ccs 

If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.   Pete Seeger  

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.   Daniel Kahneman

Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.   John Wooden  

There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature -- its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity.   Suzanne Simard 

The encumbering elements of our histories must be spoken aloud, at least in the caverns of our brains, if we wish for them to take up wings.   Laird Hunt 

Forgetting (he is learning) is how how world heals itself.   Anthony Doerr 

Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm.   Patrick Bringley 

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge.   Patrick Bringley  

The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion it has taken place.   George Bernard Shaw 

He chose to think freely, and that made his tribal membership impossible.   Ian Buruma, about Spinoza 

Governments don't like to govern, but they like to control. Human freedom always takes a back seat.   Andy Kessler

Wit is the swiftest motion of the brain, thought at its most natural, agile, active, and self-governing.   Margaret Cavendish

Your "we" is not my "we".   ccs

No graceful way out of manners.   Hernan Diaz

Poetry should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.   Wei T'ai

This thing is not happening to you. It is happening for you.   Lane Florsheim  

 Let's give thanks.   Levi, age 3 

Belief was not about actually believing; belief was simply somewhere to shelve hope.   Mick Herron 

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.   Colum McCann 

The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.   Leo Tolstoy 

There's no such thing as good writing, there's only good rewriting.   Scott Pelley 

Credulity and falsehood copulate, and give birth to opinion.   Paul Valéry 

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.   Maya Angelou 

Symptoms are neither causes nor diagnoses.   ccs 

Religion offers a compass but not a map.   Michael Luo 

Some things are better than others, and civilization depends on choosing the better ones.   David Hoopman 

Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest.   Teju Cole 

You don't venture into a wilderness expecting to find a paved road.   C. Walton Lillehei 

Whenever I don't know what to do, I watch what I am doing.   Elizabeth Strout 

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.   Cormac McCarthy 

Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.   G. K. Chesterton 

But the absence of a thing will loom larger than its presence...   Maddie Mortimer 

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note -- it's the note you play afterward that makes it right or wrong.   Miles Davis

What we see depends on what makes sense in the moment.   Andy Clark 

Diversity requires scale and connectivity.   David Quammen 

We can do some things badly and still feel good about having done them, and some things well and still feel badly about not having done them better. Equilibrium of the mind is achieved by doing both.   Adam Gopnik

When you have no expectations, reality has an easier time impressing you.   Sebastian Modak 

There's no way of knowing what will really count until later, and then it's too late. Better choose.   B. D. McClay 

The best gift you can give someone is to get yourself together.   Wendy Palmer 

Justice is only ever retrospective. It can never right a wrong.   Gerard Baker 

This is temporary.   bumpersticker 

There is no us and them. It's just us.   Hayley Campbell 

Incompetence doesn't recognize itself.   David G. Meyers 

Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock.   Rebecca Solnit 

Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it's gone.   Barry Lopez 

When you get to the top, always remember to send the elevator back down.   Satchmo 

The chief engine of change is conversation.   Evan Wolfson 

Nothing is anything unless there's another thing.   Cormac McCarthy 

Pain narrows your bandwidth.   ccs 

Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.   Bonhoeffer 

There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn't have to have one herself.   Kate Atkinson 

Little by little, and also in great leaps, Life happened to me.  Pablo Neruda 

Lives are long, and hard to see.   Joshua Rothman 

If light travels so fast, how come the afternoons are so long?   Charles M. Schulz 

A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood. Boldness, by definition, flouts the math that precedes it.   Jennifer Egan 

The Holy Land is everywhere.   Black Elk 

Biology is still an experimental and observational science made up of many small and seemingly disparate insights.                                          Time is the one thing that evolution has had plenty of.   Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman 

The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.   Simone Weil 

Environment is the influence upon each inner mind of the thing shared by every inner mind; it is the common layer of air which we all breathe -- the filament which binds our separate lives.   Benton MacKaye 

Out of a whole lifetime, by God, sometimes the only thing that saves a person is error, and I know that we shall not be saved so long as our error is not precious to us.   Clarice Lispector   

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.   Vaclav Havel 

The wind, one brilliant day, called.   Antonio Machado 

"...not so much that you are moving in a better way, but that you like what you are doing more."   Elaine Yoder (Feldenkrais class) 

Memory changes shape as it transforms into nostalgia.   Linda Holmes 

Complex systems like living organisms need to allow some things to change in order for other things to stay the same.  Anil Seth 

We need one another to be able to see and understand this world of ours.   ccs

The brain knows more than the conscious mind reveals.   Antonio Damasio 

We humans are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative and the most destructive of all species.   David Graeber and David Wengrow 

Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body.   Bessel Van der Kolk  

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.   William James   

There is no limit to what a man can do...if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.   William Strickland

Language is the only homeland.   Czeslaw Milosz 

If you don’t want to suffer, if you don’t want to be tormented by regret, the only solution is to live every minute you are given in a deep way. That’s all there is to it.   Thich Nhat Hanh

We're always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we're at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs -- or doesn't -- in that instant.   George Saunders 

Magic is always impossible. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between.  That is why it is magic.   Kate DiCamillo   

Without friction, we lose our footing.   Julian Lucas  

He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.   Charles Dickens

The trick wasn't necessarily having less fear, it was finding more courage.   Louise Penny

Let each man hope and believe what he can.   Charles Darwin 

Don't let someone who hasn't been in your shoes tell you how to tie the laces.   social media 

There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.   H. Richard Niebuhr

The distance between us is holy ground.   Raphael Jesús Gonzáles

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.   Roger Maltbie  

My secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon.   Sister Chan Khong

Better is possible.  ccs 

The path is made visible as we walk it.  Narayan Helen Liebenson 

The only learning curve worth being on is a steep one.  Tahir Shah  

Organisms self-organize.  Merlin Sheldrake 

On the most basic level, our task is to endure until life has a chance to teach us what we need to know.  Narayan Helen Liebenson  

Wherever you are is the entry point.  Kabir 

So much to do still, all of it praise.  Derek Walcott 

What is the body? Endurance. What is love? Gratitude. What is hidden in our chest? Laughter. What else? Compassion.   Rumi

Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its beauty is received.  Richard K. Nelson

Three things cannot remain long hidden: the sun, the moon, the truth.  the Buddha

Happiness does not depend on being happy.   Anne Michaels

Nothing works that isn't authentic.   Peggy Noonan 

Long life, honey in the heart, no evil, thirteen thank yous.  Martin Praechtel

Even after all these years, the sun never says to the earth, "You owe me".  Hafiz  

Our task is to embody what we have found to be of use.   ???

Trust is earned in the smallest of moments. It is earned not through heroic deeds, or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection.   Brené Brown  

I have no sympathy with people who find unpopularity embittering.  Marianne Moore

My actions are my only true blessings.   the Buddha

Be a good doorway.  Robert Nadeau  

Poverty is not lack of stuff but lack of choice.   ccs

Penicillin was discovered by accident. One must keep the petri dishes ready.   Richard Powers

I love a broad margin to my life.   Henry David Thoreau

My business is circumference.   Emily Dickinson  

It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught.  Kay Ryan

People have grain.   Kathy Park (sculptor)

The only way to thrive in a marriage is to become a better person.   David Brooks

Attention is the fundamental literacy.   Howard Rheingold

Information under-represents reality.  Jaron Lanier  

Never, ever, try to impress someone.  Augustin Burroughs  

When in doubt: move closer; delve deeper; imagine larger; wait longer.  ccs

It's only weird if it doesn't work.  Beer ad