Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.”
Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
“How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re like.”
Goethe
“Many of us know the joy and excitement not so much of creating the new as of redeeming what has been neglected, and this excitement is particularly strong when the original condition is seen as holy or beautiful.”
J. B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins: and Other Topics
“I do not advise you to deny anything to nature—for nature is insistent, and cannot be overcome; it demands its due.”
“We must make it our aim to have already lived long enough.”
Seneca, Epistles
“A man who frequently consorts with certain others, whether for conversation, for banquets, or just generally for good fellowship, must either become like them or else change them along his own lines.”
Epictetus, Discourses
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”
“As a child I could always attend more closely to gardens than to forests, probably because forests contain so little of the human information that I craved then, and gardens so much.”
Michael Pollan, Second Nature
“We are ever striving after what is forbidden, and coveting what is denied us.”
Ovid
“I never expect anything. I just feel things in my gut and I do them. If something sounds exciting and interesting, I do it—and then I worry about it later. Doing new things takes a lot of energy and strength. It’s very tiring to make things happen, to learn how to master a skill, to push fears aside. Most people would rather just go with the flow, it’s much easier. But it’s not very interesting.”
Iris Apfel, Musings of a Geriatric Starlet
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Voltaire
“These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,–the complexion, the special flavor, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.”
Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
Leonardo da Vinci
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
Marcus Aurelius
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”
Winston Churchill
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
George Moore
