"How’s this poem for its ability to collapse all the years from childhood to middle age in a matter of fifteen short lines?"

"I think one of my gifts is also one of my weaknesses. Which is, I have a kind of antenna for other people. My friends and my producers might disagree with me about this, but I think an antenna that picks up on what other people are feeling. But there's something good and bad about that."

~ Terry Gross

"The true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia."

~ Maria Popova

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood here now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?
Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
we share a birthdate?

~ Wisława Szymborska

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the center

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that communal process of falling.

~ John Glenday

Without a clue, no place to go...

~ Lee van Laer

"The only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is."

~ Bill Murray

"Structure, it's all imposed. We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos."

~ Julianne Moore

May this house shelter your life.
When you come home here,
May all the weight of the world
Fall from your shoulders.

~ John O'Donohue

"We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can't describe it."

~ Simon Van Booy

"It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here."

~ John O'Donohue

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

~ David Whyte

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks

~ Erin Belieu

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

~ Mark Strand

"Employers should really embrace people taking power naps at work. But it's going to have to be more grass roots. More organic. But sometimes that's what it takes: a wake-up call."

~ Dr. James Hamblin

What does this word attention mean?

"Wearing a futuristic headset embeded with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, Lisa Park moniters her own brain activity during meditation and transposes this energy onto dishes of water to reveal zen-like vibrations."  

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week

~ W. S. Merwin

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Louise Glück

Have Judson Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one?