Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“It is curious how the act of writing leads to confession.”
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”
Émilie du Châtelet
“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for.”
Georgia O’Keefe, interview in the 1977 documentary O’Keefe
“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather, My Antonia
“The fact is that very few things have so much effect on the feeling inside a room as the sun shining into it.”
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
“Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.”
Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside— ”
Emily Dickinson, “Poem 632”
“I was made for the library, not the classroom.The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
“We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.”
Benjamin Disraeli
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.”
Helen Keller, The World I Live In
“There is only one time that is important— Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
Leo Tolstoy, What Men Live By and Other Tales
“Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.”
Goethe, Scientific Studies
It’s easier to demand a lot from yourself when you’re giving a lot to yourself.
Gretchen Rubin
