Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
Francis Bacon, “Of Beauty”
“Julie had always believed that even if it’s the big, unexpected events (good and bad) that make life memorable and occasionally exciting, it’s the small, predictable routines that hold life together and make it worth living.”
Stephen McCauley, My Ex-Life
“Speed is not part of the true Way of strategy. Speed implies that things seem fast or slow, according to whether or not they are in rhythm. Whatever the Way, the master of strategy does not appear fast….Of course, slowness is bad. Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”
Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
“Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,
“From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”
Henry Matisse with Pierre Courthion, Chatting with Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview
“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life
“One does not ‘find oneself’ by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.”
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
