How can we live
without the unknown before us?
-René Char

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
-T. S. Eliot

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door:
let's go!
-E. E. Cummings

I am going out into the universe
to stroll on the Milky Way.
-Hugh Robert Orr

Why do we do it?

Oh, Hell! What's the use?

Why battle with the universe?

Why not declare a truce?

-Elsie Janis

I am my own Universe.

I am my own Professor.

-Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
-Edmund Waller

If you unlock a door for the first time,
open it cautiously.
Only enter when you are comfortable with the open door.
-Flemming Funch

To pass freely through open doors,
it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames.
-Robert Musil

The only people who see the whole picture
are the ones who step outside the frame.
-Salman Rushdie

There comes a time in a man's life
when to get where he has to go -
if there are no doors or windows -
he walks through a wall.
-Bernard Malamud

Voyager, there are no bridges;
one builds them as one walks.
-Gloria Anzaldua

walk on ceiling
open door
step into sky
-John Sandbach

She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see,
except standing there leaning on the balcony railing,
holding the universe together.
-J. D. Salinger

The center of the world
is exactly where you stand.
-Talmud

I have an existential map;
it has 'you are here' written all over it.
-Steven Wright

You are at the summit of a solitary peak,
yet you are at the crossroads.
You are at the crossroads,
yet you are still on the summit of a solitary peak.
-Hengchuan

The shortest distance between two points
is often unbearable.
-Charles Bukowski

The journey is my home.
-Muriel Rukeyser

Life is a process.
We are a process.
The universe is a process.
-Anne Wilson Schaef

Nothing is more important
than the existence of what does not exist.
-John Hawkes

All is pattern...
but we can't see the pattern
when we're part of it.
-Belva Plain

The most important thing is to find out
what is the most important thing.
-Shunryu Suzuki

Things are not what they seem;
Nor are they otherwise.
-Lankavatara Sutra

All sorts of stories can be told.
Not all of them need to be believed.
-Mikhail Bulgakov

An idea isn't responsible

for the people who believe in it.

-Don Marquis

Be careful how you interpret the world:
it is like that.
-Erich Heller

Our assumptions about the world
become our world.
-Stephen Mitchell

Giving a phenomenon a label
does not explain it.
-Taylor Caldwell

And what can't be explained
is in no way nonsensical.
-Yevgeny Yevtsuhenko

A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see that life is two locked boxes
each containing the other's key.
-Piet Hein

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world,
the better I possess it.
-Gaston Bachelard

I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking.
-Chrtistopher Isherwood.

Machinery is the subconscious mind
of the world.
-Gerald Stanley Lee

Let us stop talking falsely now

The hour's getting late.

-Bob Dylan

It's always just beginning.
Everything is always just beginning.
-Jakuso Kwong

Hasten slowly, and without losing heart,
Put your work twenty times on the anvil.
-Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

Turn away no more,
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The watery shore
Is giv'n thee till the break of day.
-William Blake

Go forth to seek; the quarry never found
Is still fever to the questing hound,
The skyline is a promise, not a bound.
-John Masefield

Think about wheels any time you like.
Any little wheel you see is worth looking at.
The sun is a wheel, the moon is a wheel.
Many a night star is a wheel.

And in your head, in many little places behind
Your blinking wonderful eyes, you can find,
If you try, ten thousand wheels within wheels.
-Carl Sandburg

The investigation of the external world
is a quest for structure rather than substance.
-Arthur Eddington

The whole damn universe has to be taken apart,
brick by brick, and reconstructed.
-Henry Miller

I must create a system,
or be enslaved by another man's.
-William Blake

I believe forever in the hooks
The way things work is that eventually something catches.
-Jorie Graham

There is a right physical size for every idea.
-Henry Moore

The universe (which others call the Library)
is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
-Jorges Luis Borges

The order of creation is an order of chalk,
then of marble.
-Edmond Jabes

What is the universal?
The single case.
What is the particular?
Millions of cases.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are four kinds of transitions:
space, time, emotion and viewpoint.
-Sylvia Burak

Color answers feeling in man;
shape answers thoughts;
and motion answers will.
-John Sterling

Perfumes, colors and sounds
echo one another.
-Charles Baudelaire

All that is, is metaphor.
-Norman O. Brown

I inhabited a proverb so vast
that I needed the universe to fill it.
-Robert Sabatier

Passion holds up the bottom of the universe
and genius paints up its roof.
-Chang Ch-ao

Instead of saying
that man is the creature of circumstance,
it would be nearer the mark to say
that man is the architect of circumstance.
-Thomas Carlyle

It appears to me that almost any man
may like the spider spin from his own inwards
his own airy citadel.
-John Keats

We are exactly where we have chosen to be.
-Vernon Howard

Plans are worthless,
but planning is everything.
-Dwight G. Eisenhower

To live effectively
is to live with adequate information.
-Norbert Wiener

Particulars are not to be examined
till the whole has been surveyed.
-Emanuel Celler

Divide each difficulty
into as many parts as is feasible and necessary.
-Rene Descartes

An unhatched egg
is to me the greatest challenge in life.
-E. B. White

It may be hard for an egg
to turn into a bird:
it would be a jolly sight harder
for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.
We are like eggs at present.
And you cannot go on indefinitely
just being an ordinary decent egg.
We must be hatched or go bad.
-C. S. Lewis

Potential has a shelf life.
-Margaret Atwood

It's amazing what doesn't exist
in the real world.
-Allan Watts

We did not come to remain whole,
we came to lose our leaves like the trees,
the trees that are broken, but starting again...
drawing up from the great roots.
-Robert Bly

He found it a skeleton,
and clothed it with life, color, and complexion;
he embrace the cold statue,
and by his touch it grew into youth, health, and beauty.
-Barry Yelverton, Lord Avonmore

What a strange power there is in clothing.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

With the possible exception of the equator,
everything begins somewhere.
-C. S. Lewis

Each arrival is the beginning of a room.
-Robert Sabatier

When the image is new,
the world is new.
-Gaston Bachelard

For things and for poems,
there is but one way of being new,
and that is to be true;
there is only one way of being young,
and that is to be eternal.
-Paul Claudel

Everything seems an echo
of something else.
-Robert Penn Warren

To know anything
we must know its effects.
-Samuel Johnson

There cannot be anything, in fact
- either in the internal or the external world -
that does not have a cause;
and every cause must produce an effect.
-Vivekananda

All things are linked together through cause and effect.
There is no such thing as an accident.
-Prajnanpad

Every event has its cause,
and nothing, not the least wind that blows,
is accident or causeless.
-Pearl S. Buck

Chance is a word void of sense;
nothing can exist without a cause.
-Voltaire

Everything has a cause,
and the cause of anything is everything.
-Stewart W. Holmes

All these mountains, rivers,
this whole great earth
Where does it all come from?
Where does your question come from?
-Cheng-tao ke

Lights and thoughts are social and sportive:
they delight in playing with and into each other.
-Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

He has a fancy for always sitting in a pitch-dark room.
He says it makes his thought brighter.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton

And out of their silvery speech
they built up hours.
-Rainer Marie Rilke

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.
-R.S. Thomas

An idea, to be suggestive,
must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
-William James

Observe you life, between two breaths.
Breath is a wind, both coming and going.
On this wind you have built your life -
but how will a castle rest on a cloud?
-Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

We've lost the essence
and worship the husk.

But who wants the shell
without tasting the nut?

Seduced by the form,
we're not really alive -

Regaining the essence,
we've become life itself.
-Sana'i

Each of us treasures the places
where we were taught best the nature of things.
-Chaim Potok

Some things become so completely our own
that we forget them.
-Antonio Porchia

We do not know the true value of our moments
until they have undergone the test of memory.
-Georges Duhamel

Memories have a mind of their own.
-William Douglas Horden

Slow days, passing, accumulating,
How distant they are,
The things of the past!
-Buson

I've found you've got to look back at the old things
and see them in a new light.
-John Coltrane

Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose-garden.
-T. S. Eliot

There is a whole town
Of memories in my heart;
A whole universe of stars
In this blue emptiness.
-Jaishankar Prasad

It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean,
but it was heard at great depth and great distance.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go,
on whatever we touch.
-Lewis Thomas

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
-Alexander Pope

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.
Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines
is a drawing of his own face.
-Jorge Luis Borges

Progress never marches in a parade.
-Walter Winchell

The problems that agitate one generation
are extinguished for the next,
not because they are solved
but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
-Cesare Pavese

A revolution only lasts fifteen years,
a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset

Whoever marries the spirit of this age
will find himself a widower in the next.
-William Ralph Inge

The bubble winked at me and said,
"You'll miss me brother, when you're dead."
-Oliver Herford

The poetry of earth is never dead.
-John Keats

You are dead -
what am I speaking to?
-Philip Pullman

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
-John Keats

When you take a flower in your hand
and really look at it,
it's your world for the moment.
-Georgia O'Keefe

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
-Matsuo Basho

All are nothing but flowers in a flowering universe.
-Soen Nakagawa

The flower that grows above the clouds
will never wither.
-Kahlil Gibran

It was the rainbow that gave thee birth,
and left thee all thy lovely hues.
-W. H. Davies

Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?
-Pablo Neruda

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
is in fact the rainbow itself.
-Martin Schulman

I'll dip my brush 
into the sunrise, and the sunset, and the rainbow.
-Rudolf Besier

Rainbows apologize for angry skies.
-Sylvia Voirol

Who sees the human face correctly:
the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
-Pablo Picasso

Are we to paint
what's on the face,
what's inside the face,
of what's behind it?
-Pablo Picasso

How I'd love to be a master
of the blue-sky's art:
see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he's brushed in so far today.
-Yuan Mei

A face unclouded by thought.
-Lillian Hellman

Take long walks in stormy weather
or through deep snows in the fields and woods,
if you would keep your spirits up.
Deal with brute nature.
Be cold and hungry and weary.
-Henry David Thoreau

You possess
only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.
-El-Ghazali

Catch the air
around the butterfly.
-Katerina Stoykova Klemer

I swear the earth shall surely be complete
to him or her who shall be complete.
The earth remains jagged or broken
only to him or her who remains jagged or broken.
-Walt Whitman

Lighthouses are built to stand alone
and to bear the brunt of the storm
no matter what that storm may be.
-Tom Wolfe

I have no way of my own, no personal interests;
for the Life I am is equally interested in all things,
and not centered anywhere.
-Jacob Beilhart

There seems no plan because it's all plan.
There seems no center because it's all center.
-C. S. Lewis

Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up.
-Antonio Machado

The task of the solitary man
is to be even more solitary.
-Emil Cioran

When I drop a line down a thousand feet,
My objective lies in the depths of the pool.
-Zen Saying

The spot I am standing on is small,
but it must disappear.
-Meister Eckhart

Progress Report

Now I'm
into things

so small
when I

say boo
I disappear.
-A. R. Ammons

My obligation is this:

To be transparent.

-Pablo Neruda

Night takes our proof away from us;
we no longer know where we are...
Our vision no longer has the visible as its limit,
but the invisible as its prison,
homogeneous, immediate, indifferent, compact.
-Paul Claudel

If Night is personified, it is as a goddess whom nothing resists,
who envelops everything, who hides everything;
she is the goddess of the Veil.
-Gaston Bachelard

Doesn't everything
Inspire us
To bear the colors of Night?
-Novalis

The honey of night is consumed slowly.
-Rene Char

There's nothing to be taught,
nothing to be transmitted.
It is just a matter of seeing one's own nature.
-Dajian Huineng

You cannot transcend what you do not know.
To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.
-Nisargadatta

Every moment of your life
there must be discrimination
of the real from the unreal.
-Yogeshwari

And the rest is rust and stardust.
-Vladimir Nabokov

I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
-John Keats

I exist as I am, that is enough.
-Walt Whitman

Only the phoenix rises and does not descend.
 -Neil Gaiman

At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
-Stanley Kunitz

Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my hearts in unison strike twelve.
-Stanley Kunitz

The dead of midnight is the moon of thought,
And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
-Anna Letitia Barbauld

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still, and still moving
Into another intensity
for a further union, a deeper communion.
-T.S. Eliot

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.
-Marguerite Yourcenar

You could say that I started my learning
with what was given to me at birth,
continued with what was natural for me to do,
and complete it by trusting what was meant to be.
-Lieh Tzu

I am deep in the old man's puzzle,
trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit
until the two are one.
-Robertson Davies

A sense of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
-William Wordsworth

Long years may pass
before the truths we have made for ourselves
become our very flesh.
-Paul Valery

It is the figure of a man which I have modeled and remodeled,
and cannot get exactly to my liking.
so it is necessary that I keep laboring at it,
until the figure is to my thinking and my desire.
-James Branch Cabell

I have been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form.
-The Book of Taliesin

It is returning, at last it is coming home to me -
my own Self and those parts of it that have long been abroad
and scattered among all things and accidents.
-Friedrich von Nietzsche

Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
-John Fletcher

Seven years of silent inquiry are needful
for a man to learn the truth,
but fourteen in order to learn
how to make it known to his fellow man.
-Plato

At fifty, that is in 1880,
I formulated the idea of unity,
without being able to render it.
At sixty, I am beginning to see
the possibility of rendering it.
-Camille Pissarro

At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure
of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects.
Consequently when I am eighty I'll have made more progress.
At ninety I'll have penetrated the mystery of things.
At one hundred I shall have reached something marvelous,
but when I am 110 everything I do,
the smallest dot, will be alive.
-Hokusai

There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute;
for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine.
Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention.
All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.
There is nothing non-exclusive but the All;
my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.
-Henri Frederic Amiel

Immensity is the movement
of motionless man.
-Gaston Bachelard

All forces have been steadily employ'd to
complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
-Walt Whitman

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of the earth,
I am the mate and companion of people,
all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
-Walt Whitman

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution
and I know the amplitude of time.
-Walt Whitman

At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.
-Clarice Lispector