#literature and fostering passion for it and helping the masses find the interest to improve their own

[quiltedlovers]

im not booktok’s intended audience and am a hashtag hater for many reasons but jack edwards is doing something right

[geraldslombardo-blog]

ENCYCLOPEDIA EXISTENTIÀ

1. Abraham Lincoln: Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

2. Abraham Lincoln: In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

3. Albert Einstein: Learn from yesterday, live for today and never stop questioning, curiosity has its own reason for existing.

4. Andrew Sullivan: You can love someone more than you know him, and he can be perfectly loved without being perfectly known. But the more you know a friend, the more a friend he is, friendship is about the complicated enjoyment of human autonomy.

5. Benjamin Franklin: By failing to prepare, you prepare to fail.

6. Benjamin Franklin: If you persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.

7. Bertrand Russell: All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living.

8. Bertrand Russell: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

9. Bertrand Russell: Only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands in advance that the world shall conform to its desires.

10. Bertrand Russell: The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

11. Bob Dylan: A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

12. Bob Dylan: Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

13. Bob Dylan: People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

14. Booker T. Washington: Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

15. C.S. Lewis: In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history […] Friendship has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

16. C.S. Lewis: Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality […] In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

17. Cus D’Amato: I believe a man is a professional when he can do what needs to be done no matter how he feels within. An amateur is an amateur in his attitude emotionally. A professional is an professional in the way he thinks and feels and in his ability to execute under the most trying conditions.

18. Cus D’Amato: What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward.

19. Dan Dennett: Find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.

20. David Attenborough: An understanding of the natural world and what’s in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

21. David Foster Wallace: A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. David Foster Wallace

22. David Olgilvy: Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.

23. David Olgilvy: Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

24. Debbie Millman: Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.

25. Douglass MacArthur: Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

26. Dwight D. Eisenhower: Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

27. E.B. White: Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

28. E.B. White: Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

29. E.B. White: 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.

30. Edwin Land: An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

31. Edwin Land: If you dream of something worth doing then simply go work on it and don’t think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you think of, detail-by-detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even though the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and [when you] start taking the first ten, and … twenty after that, it is amazing how quickly you get through through the four thousand [nine hundred] and ninety. The last ten steps you never seem to work out. But you keep on coming nearer to giving the world something.

32. Edwin Land: Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

33. Edwin Land: The second great product of Industry should be the rewarding life for every person.

34. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Nothing any good isn’t hard.

35. Francis of Assisi: Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

36. François-René de Chateaubriand: A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, he simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

37. Friedrich Nietzsche: Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself.

38. Friedrich Nietzsche: No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.

39. George Bernard Shaw: Some men see things as they are and ask why? Others dream things that never were and ask why not?

40. George Patton: Do everything you ask of those you command.

41. Henry Adams: Chaos was the law of nature. Order was the dream of man.

42. Hugh MacLeod: The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

43. Joan Didion: We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

44. John Brockman: The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.

45. John Lennon: Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

46. John Lennon: The artists role [in society] is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not to tell people how to feel as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of all of us.

47. John Lennon: The more I see the less I know for sure.

48. Lao Tzu: A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

49. Mark Twain: Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

50. Mark Twain: Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

51. Mark Twain: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

52. Mark Twain: Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

53. Mark Twain: Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

54. Mary Oliver: Artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities […] creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist.

55. Mary Oliver: There is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

56. Michelangelo: Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it’s the job of the sculptor to discover it.

57. Milton Berle: If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.

58. Muhammad Ali: I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.

59. Neil Gaiman: Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

60. Paul Graham: Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like […] Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first […] Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.

61. Peter O’Toole: I shall not be a common man, I shall stir the smooth sands of monotony.

62. Peter Thiel: You are not a lottery ticket.

63. Plato: What is honored in a country will [ultimately] be cultivated there.

64. Rainer Maria Rilke: Avoid providing material for the drama, that is always stretched tight between parent and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend Don’t ask for any advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

65. Rainer Maria Rilke: I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.

66. Rainer Maria Rilke: Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you, for those who are near you are far away […] And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.

67. Raymond E. Feist: Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

68. Sharon Lebell: The wisest among us appreciate the natural limits of our knowledge and have the mettle to preserve their naiveté […] Clear thinking and self-importance cannot logically coexist.

69. Sharon Lebell: This is our predicament: Over and over again, we lose sight of what is important and what isn’t. We crave things over which we have no control, and are not satisfied by the things within our control. We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing or hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.

70. Sharon Lebell: Virtue is our aim and purpose. The virtue that leads to enduring happiness is not a quid pro quo goodness (i.e. I’ll be good “in order to get something”). Goodness in and of itself is the practice and the reward […] One cannot pursue one’s own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others.

71. Socrates: An unexamined life is not worth living.

72. Socrates: Know thyself.

73. Socrates: The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

74. Steve Jobs: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

75. Steve Jobs: Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.

76. Steve Jobs: Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

77. Steven Johnson: Chance favors the connected mind.

78. Susan Sontag: Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example — for courage is as contagious as fear.

79. Susan Sontag: The beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding.

80. Tacitus: Success has 1,000 fathers, failure is an orphan.

81. Theodore Roosevelt: It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

82. Theodore Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

83. Thomas Edison: Vision without execution is hallucination.

84. Truman Capote: A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

85. Vera John-Steiner: In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.

86. Viktor Frank: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom […] Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

87. Viktor Frank: Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

88. Viktor Frank: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

89. Virginia Woolf: Life is a dream. ’Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

90. William Blake: No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

91. William Blake: The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

92. William Blake: The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.

93. William Blake: To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

94. William Blake: What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men, that which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

95. William Shakespeare: Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

96. William Shakespeare: Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

97. William Shakespeare: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

98. William Shakespeare: What’s past is prologue.

99. Winston Churchill: All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.

100. Winston Churchill: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.