"I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."

"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

- Anais Nin

Having no destination
I am never lost. - Ikkyu (1394-1481)

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

“Zen in its essence is the art of seeing.”

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well poetry is just the ash.” - Leonard Cohen

"Life should be a daring adventure or nothing at all." - Helen Keller

"Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup but a comedy in long shot." - Charlie Chaplin

"Chance is the only way to avoid the control of the rational." - Marcel Duchamp

Imagination is memory.

"You know, every soul comes into the world to take a curriculum. Some are taking Basket Weaving 101. Some are taking Astrophysics 406 and I'm pleased to be taking the harder courses."
Peripheral visionary." - John Perry Barlow

"The cost of the thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." - Thoreau

"At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mysteries of life itself. At 100 I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110 everything I create, a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before." - Hokusai (1760-1849) The Great Wave

"Picasso himself said it. Art, he said, Is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth. The alternative is grim. Reality? It’s the toothbrush waiting at home for you in its glass, a bus ticket, a pay check, and the grave.”

Today your life and destiny are the same.

On the meridan of time there is no injustice; there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.

You're led to believe a lie when you see with not through the eye.

There are not many things you need to remember about your visit here to the Earth.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. - Steve Jobs

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
– Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, 1995.

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it.
- Steve Jobs

Men are like floor tiles. If you lay them right the first time you can walk on them for years.

In 2000 BC people were fighting and killing each other and no one knew who the king is. See? It's still the same.

There are only two things to learn. When to move and when to sit still.

Takuan Soho taught that anxieties, lust, fear, and greed litter the mind, act to distract us in life and in combat may cause a fatal mistake.

There's a huge difference between probability and possibility.

The bigger the fear the bigger the defense.

Nature is what you can be. Culture is what you are.

"If you want to know a tree, go to a tree." - Basho

"Matter is revealed to our consciousness through metaphor alone. There is no existence outside comparison because existence itself is comparison." - Osip Mandelstam

"The best travelers are illiterate and they do not bore us with reminiscences." - Bruce Chatwin

The Vietnamese plant rice. The Cambodians watch it grow. The Laotians listen to it grow.

“The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.” - Harold Norse 1917-2009

What I am describing is not really what you are interested in. - U.G. Krishnamurti

..."lies the great absurdity of Life, the harshness of society, the dumb failure of law and authority, the fragility of social structures" - Simon Louvish's book on Charlie Chaplin

"We will open the book. It's pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and it's first chapter is New Year's Day." - Edith Lovejoy Pierce

"Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus." - Elizabeth Alexander

"We find the creative process works much better when we function as a kind of collective mind." - Onion editor

"Writing is like dreaming when you are awake. When you're a writer you can continue your dream every day. It's fun." - Haruki Murakami

"If I had a plan I'd be screwed." - Paul Newman

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

"I'm losing my ability to make connections because the ones I make so belittle the natural complexity." - John Cage

"Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would never let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language..." - Italo Calvino

"Life gives you too many things to remember here (in your head). What touches your heart will always be remembered." - a grandfather telling his grandson a story in Iran.

"Poetry is only words that make you feel something special inside."

"I want to be a writer." - a nine-year young Indonesian girl.

"What is essential is invisible to the eye." - The Little Prince

Shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunters-gatherers.

"Before we are born we know everything. Then, after being born we forget everything because of the pain." - Zeynep

"In taiko, man becomes the sound. In taiko, you can hear the sound through your skin. Your heart is a taiko. All people listen to a taiko rhythm dontsuku-dontsuku in their mother’s womb. It’s instinct to be drawn to taiko drumming.” - Daihachi Oguchi, Japanese Drummer

"From a very early age I've had to interrupt my education to go to school."
- George Bernard Shaw

"If there is a choice, I would rather have ideas and some difficulties with technique than a perfect technique and no ideas." - Mstislav Rostropovich

"Use it or lose it." - Sage speak

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

"...Flowing through the six empty places;
Rising and sinking without fixed law,
Firm and yielding transform each other."

"Welcome to Earth. Hello babies. It is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It is round, wet and crowded. At the outside you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'" - Kurt Vonnegut

"...the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." - William Faulkner

"Civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss." - Allen Tate

What you perceive as fantasy
is the product of your imagination.
What you perceive as reality
is also the product of your imagination.
Without imagination
reality is nothing. - G. Seto

"Make a meal of your words." - Shakespeare

"Just get to the verb." - Robert Altman

"Freedom is terror." - Camus

"There are times when one must spend an afternoon with one whom one will never see again."
- Georgia O'Keeffe

"Our greatest national illness is our isolation, an isolation that breeds fear, forcing us to live a life deprived of real intimacy. Poetry cuts through this isolation." - Walt Whitman

"Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides."
"I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received."
"In my silence only my voice is missing."
"I keep my hands empty for the sake of what I have had in them."
- Antonio Porchia

"No class, no struggle. Now it's all about money." - Chinese university student

"I am not afraid of anybody because I do not want anything." - a Cairo poet

"I have sought, I am searching, and I will search for what I call the Total Phenomenon, that is the Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, possibilities and impossibilities."- Paul Valery

"Language is like a crack'd kettle on which we beat out tunes for dancing bears, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity." - Gustave Flaubert

"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"The term haii, which underpins the word haiku, means comic, lighthearted, sportive. It implies a sense of high-spirited innovation, some wise irreverence, and not a little reckless spontaneity."

“Tabi wa jinsei desu,” means “Travel is human life — life is a journey.” - Basho

"The dominant culture of technology and big business and big government is not the important lasting culture of our civilization. The important culture of our civilization is the literary and artistic and intellectual culture. That's the mainstream, and I'm proud to be part of that." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Kafka grasped that language itself - even the very plainest and most direct - is innately metaphorical, fabulated and grotesque."

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say."
- Anais Nin

Writers get to treat their mental illness every day.