Based on the battle-tested principle that if a fresh nugget of inspiration or insight illuminates some facet of life on earth for me, then it will for you, too.
Spicy. Funny. Challenging. Fresh. All the way from Plato to Einstein and Hunter S. Thompson.
Winnow favorites for your own private, wear-it-on-the-inside-of-your-brain bumper stickers.
I will be posting new ones from time to time. Check back. And send me your favorites.
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The basis of optimism is sheer terror. – Oscar Wilde
As artists, it is our job to slow down the world. – Rose Marcus
I don’t think there’s anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It’s the other attitude that confuses me.
– Paul Newman
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
– Thorstein Veblen
When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all planning and decisions have been made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. – Sol LeWitt
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
– Andre Gide
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. – Plutarch
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ― Carl Sagan
The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. ― Plato, “The Republic”
It’s not a matter of painting life. It’s a matter of giving life to painting. – Pierre Bonnard
Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want. ― Anna Lappe
If you think you’re going to complete your life’s vision in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.
– Wes Jackson [Founder of The Land Institute]
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. – Edgar Allan Poe
Everything that is solid melts into the air. – Karl Marx
Eroticism is close to life, closer than philosophy or anything like that, it’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint. – Marcel Duchamp
Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head. – A.E. Housman
Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power. – Gregory Corso
To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next. – Lewis Hyde in The Gift.
I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction, the world will have a generation of idiots. – Albert Einstein
