More important than knowledge is wisdom, which distills experience with razor-like sharpness, symmetry and beauty, simplicity and kindness. Each year I collect interesting, insightful and inspirational statements and self-publish them as a book for friends and family. Here are the first few pages I found for 2017:
“I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened by old ones.“ John Cage
“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is part of thought.” Oliver Sacks
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Albert Camus
“Do something wonderful. People may imitate it.” Albert Schweitzer
“I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.” Gustav Mahler
“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.” John Updike
“The man who converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.” Honoré de Balzac
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” Khalil Gibran
“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.” William E. Gladstone
“You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.” Anton Chekhov
“Wealth is like seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.” Arthur Schopenhauer
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Richelieu
“When brothers fight to the death, a stranger inherits their father’s estate.” Chinua Achebe
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” Marie Curie
“In any negotiation, “no” is just the beginning of the conversation.” Raymond Shonholtz
“What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions.” Jane Goodall
“Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.” Gabriela Mistral
“The only solutions that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves.” Satyajit Ray
"Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Childhood is that state which ends the moment a puddle is first viewed as an obstacle instead of as an opportunity.” Michael K. Williams
“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.” Milan Kundera
Downloadable Collections: