In art, Rilke had started to realize, there was never anything waiting on the other side: There was no god, no secret revealed, and in most cases no reward. There was only the doing.
Rilke wrote “in a tone of authority that only an amateur would dare.”
If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.
We are imperfect lenses trying to resolve our influences onto a new screen, and the mistakes we make in copying we call originality.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Watch a child when she is drawing or painting. You will see a worried look on her face — a look of intense concentration. Is she working or playing?
Song itself cannot happen without time, without the voice rising and falling away.
For is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
New things are happening very quietly inside of me.
The paradoxical virtue of reading: it takes us out of the world so we might find meaning in it.
Perhaps the most true and timeless version of Paris, for everyone, might be a version of this one — the Paris filtered through remembered dreams.
In the face of what looks like unbroken failure, she is so persistent. Most of her experiments, her efforts to predict and control her environment, don’t work. But she goes right on, not the least daunted. Perhaps this is because there are no penalties attached to failure, except nature’s—usually if you try to step on a ball, you fall down. A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame, disgrace, a crime. Unlike her elders, she is not concerned with protecting herself against everything that is not easy and familiar; she reaches out to experience, she embraces life.
You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life anymore than you can stay passionately in love forever, or grieve forever for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busy work of living.
Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it.
Okay, nurture the positive human parts of yourself and hope they get into your work, eventually.
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to…
You know when you’re saying goodbye to somebody at the airport that you love and you get all soft? You’re like, “Oh my god, I hardly knew ya.” You know, that kind of feeling? What if that’s the truth? That that times ten is the mode that we should exist in all the time? Then another day you’re just yourself. There’s a big gap between those two people.
So, my regret would be how much time did I spend in that regular, old, stupid habitual mindset of taking everything for granted, as opposed to this exalted state of being super-tenderized to the people you care about.
I’m guessing that, you know, if there’s a heaven, it’s that at the airport times ten or twenty or a thousand.
How to take a compliment:
1) “Thanks for saying that, it means a lot to me.”
2) “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m really going to try to make it true.”
Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.
MetroCard is from New York City and he never lets you forget it. He has real “attitude.” He is yellow and black, with Cirque du Soleil advertisement on back.
All immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form.
He who seeks truth shall find beauty
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity
He who seeks order shall find gratification
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed
He who considers himself a servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression
He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance
My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything.
Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They cannot correct their inhuman mechanism and still succeed as networks.
Networks have their place, but that they lack any real ability to nourish their members emotionally. The only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communal facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task.