Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes.
There could not be two substances in the universe, Spinoza argued, one physical and the other divine, since this involved a logical contradiction. If God and Nature were distinct, then it must be the case that Nature had some qualities that God lacked, and the idea of a supreme being lacking anything was incoherent. It follows that God and Nature are just two names for the same thing, the Being that comprises everything that ever existed or ever will exist.
This is why, Gottlieb observes, people complain that philosophy never seems to be making progress: “Any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy.”
Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us.
Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing.
The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
That said, when I am actually procrastinating, it’s usually because at some level I don’t fully believe in (or agree with) whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid I will fail once I do get to work.
Part of that is knowing when not to work. There is a time for output but also a time for rest, for intake, for seeing what else the world has to offer.
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.