Passion
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman
I ain’t Martin Luther King. I don’t have a dream, I have a plan.
— Spike Lee
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware the irrational, however seductive.
Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.
Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.
Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.
Picture all experts as if they were mammals.
Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.
Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.
— Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
Your time of silence has come too soon. Thanks for the valiant fight.
(Thanks to A.Word.A.Day for the reference.)
I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created—created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.
Hope is the most powerful thing there is. It is the adrenalin of the soul.
— Amy Tan, from an interview on Change on To The Best of Our Knowledge