“Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference.”
Jenny Xie, The Self Is A Fiction
“Be suspicious of anyone dangling the lure of something for nothing. Get-rich-quick schemes are scams. The lottery is really a tax on the mathematically illiterate. There are no shortcuts to power.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 185)
“The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open.”
Bashō, Narrow Road To The Interior (Page 26)
“It is a great happiness to have what you desire; but it is an even greater happiness not to want more than you already have.”
Menedemus, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 156)
“Who is a wise man?—He who studies all the time.
Who is strong?—He who can limit himself.
Who is rich?—He who is happy with what he has.”
The Talmud, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 156)
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell