Are.na

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why rea…

"He would reason about people’s conduct as though a man were as simple a figure as, say, two sticks laid across each other; whereas a man is much more like the sea whose movements are too complicated …

"Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a "symptom of deficient vitality," and observed "a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in t…

”The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” – Bertrand Russell

"Beyond the mountains, more mountains." – Haitian proverb

"Life is very boring if you live life as it is." — Fiona Hardy

“Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.” — Calvin Coolidge

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look l…

"Thought constitutes the greatness of man. Man is a reed, the feeblest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed." — Blaise Pascal

”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” — John Kenneth Galbraith

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. –Emily Dickinson

Art & Fear

If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble. Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. — David Bayles & Ted Orland

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Angelo Dilullo

Ursula K Le Guin

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the wi…

"It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which t…

"It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which t…

"We all know the elephant in the room' — the topic that everyone knows is there, but no one talks about. But what about the mosquitoes in the room, the tiny things we sense but ignore?" — Mariana Ales…

"The way our group does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory." — John Dewey

from the artists way

“we correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”” ~julia cameron

"Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore les…

"I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game." — JG Ballard

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” —Jay Alto

"A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of…

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." (Werner Heisenberg)

”The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest o…

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. –Oscar Wilde

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything th…

"With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder 'control,' and when they make a wasteland, they call it 'peace.'" (Tacitus)

“Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being … an opportunity to encounter those aspects of life deeply, perhaps neurotically, hidden in our busyness. In waiting, in …