At Christmas, all roads lead home.
Marjorie Holmes

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde

The seeming defeat by the mist

The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
Rabindranath Tagore

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.
Jean Baudrillard

The knowledge of autumn

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.
Yutang Lin

(Beautiful photo by Luisa)

We can't plan life. All we can do is be available for it.
Lauryn Hill

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Winston S. Churchill

Beautiful, dark days of autumn rain

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Robert Frost, from My November Guest

A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Nadia Boulanger

Readers

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
William Lyon Phelps

I will be back

I will be away in the next couple of weeks, but I will be back in a month with more new quotes for you.
Have a great september everyone!

From a poem

Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

Mary Oliver, from Some Things The World Gave

Everything has been figured out

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Measuring life

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Maya Angelou

Special days

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens

A poem

My heart born naked
was swaddled in lullabies.
Later alone it wore
poems for clothes.
Like a shirt
I carried on my back
the poetry I had read.

So I lived for half a century
until wordlessly we met.

From my shirt on the back of the chair
I learn tonight
how many years
of learning by heart
I waited for you.

— John Berger

A pause

Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire

Arrival

...the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot

A good poem

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.
Elizabeth Bishop

All we have to do

All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.
J.R.R. Tolkien

We can never know

We can never possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
— Carl Sandburg

Counting

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Comfortable eyes

Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Poetry

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray

Used up

I want to be all used up when I die.
George Bernard Shaw

We just keep asking

So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths --
But is that an answer?

Heinrich Heine

From a sonnet...

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you as straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet XVII

Boredom

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
Richard Bach

Monotony of a decorous age

Congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Present

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it 'The Present'.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Pleasure or happines

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

The obvious

There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Profound simplicity, part 2

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
Milan Kundera

True dreams

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
 Alfred Tennyson

Profound simplicity

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
Richard Bach

Torn between two desires

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
 E.B. White

Rusty words

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
Sylvia Plath

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank

Common sense

Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.
Albert Einstein

Poetry

Poetry is like bread. It should be shared by all, by scholars and peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
Pablo Neruda
(found on Jo Bradford's blog. Check it out here)

From a sonnet...

What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love mathematics

In love, one and one are one.
Jean-Paul Sartre

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.
Diane Ackerman

The present moment

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.
Milan Kundera

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
Arthur Miller

A cocktail

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.
Francis Bacon

A poem

The Taxi
by Amy Lowell

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?