“I think a lot of the work comes out of that—turning what starts as claustrophobia or containment into something that is releasing and infinite, the paradox that we live within a body that has a skin that is our bounding condition and yet have this faculty of imaginative extension into endless space.”

~ Antony Gormley

“Almost every cognitive bias and flawed heuristic and logical fallacy I've written about for more than decade plummets in its impact on decision-making when people reason in groups, but only if those groups are allowed to argue freely without social costs for dissent or subversion.

A lot of arguing on the internet doesn't work that way. People retreat into like-minded enclaves where it seems like they are arguing, but it's mostly just people affirming one another that they chose the right group. What usually happens in those communities is that people who think of themselves as moderates will realize that the extreme is much farther along the spectrum than they thought, so to be a true moderate, they must shift their attitudes in the direction of the extreme, dragging their beliefs with them. If everyone is doing that in turn, after a few rounds, the whole group radicalizes.

This is how cults and political and conspiracy theory communities get catalyzed by the internet. It seems to them like they are arguing together while alone, but they are really arguing alone while together. It's a community of people arguing with themselves, coming up with reasons for their own feelings without contest, and when you argue with yourself, you win.”

~ David McRaney

“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?”

~ Tony Hoagland

“I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.”

~ Stephen Dunn

Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.

~ Creola Johnson

“Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.”

~ Jim Harrison

“An open question people are asking about meditation apps is: If you’re outsourcing attention to the technology itself, is it really attention that you’re developing as a skill for yourself?”

~ Rebecca Jablonsky

“When people go to the gym, for example, they know pretty much what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen. Lifting weights causes muscles to stretch and even tear a little, causing lactic acid to build up, causing the muscles to rebuild themselves bigger and with more capacity than they had before. It’s a physical process, and while trainers will debate the best methods until the end of time, the basic operation is clearly understood.

Meditation is similar. If you do the work, predictable changes in the mind and the brain tend to result, in a fairly reliable way. This, in a sense, is the very opposite of spirituality—and it’s certainly not religion either. It’s more like working out: Each time I come back to the breath, I’m strengthening very specific neural networks.”

~ Jay Michaelson

“Take a luxurious bite
out of the present,
and whistle along the road
of your destiny.”

~ Pablo Neruda

“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible? 

Can we go outside and listen?"

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

“Meditation, so I've heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?”

~ Mary Oliver

“I’m slowly learning how to bring anthropology and mindfulness together. I think they complement each other beautifully, but how to talk about it is a whole other thing. I think it comes down to excavation – what you do physically to understand where people come from. That’s a process of discovery and insight.”

Dr. Michael J. Kimball

“There usually isn’t a quick fix to what makes our lives so challenging, and that’s okay. A meditation practice, even as brief as a couple of minutes a day, can teach us how to accept the discomfort instead of trying to calm it down.”

~ Jinger Moore

“I don't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I'd not been mentally ill, nor am I asking anyone for their pity. What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not.”

~ Elyn Saks

“The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method: They hack our feelings. Not our emails, not our bank accounts—they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within.” 

~ Yuval Noah Harari

“If we don't become aware of our own reactions so that we can short-circuit precisely the kind of addictive and reflexive response that we have to these things, and if we're unwilling to turn them off, we will participate in the continuing debasement of our democracy.”

~ Brooke Gladstone

"You see dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging..."

~ John Burdett

"Every living thing
has preferences."

~ Jim Dollar

"Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear about more disasters than ever before. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite." 

~ Hans Rosling

"At this moment in time we'd like to invite
First Class passengers only to board the aircraft."

~ Simon Armitage