Inspiration
snippets from people that knew how to write
“As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
“Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”
― Bill Bryson
“Nature has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself”
— Norman Doidge
“Gradually, the observer realizes that organisms are connected to each other. Not linearly but in a net-like, entangled fabric.”
— Alexander von Humboldt
“To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to re-learn our being in it.”
— Ursula Le Guin
“The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.”
— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
“Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality. Scientists are and always have been emotional, creative, intuitive whole human beings asking questions about a world that was never meant to be cataloged and systematized.”
— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
“Science is not about building a body of known facts. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to reality check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”
— Terry Pratchett, The Science of The Discworld
“The problem, of course, with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
— Terry Pratchett
“It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.”
— Terry Pratchett
“For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.”
― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
“If you want to lift a hundred pounds, you don’t expect to succeed the first time. You start with a lighter weight and work up little by little. You actually fail to lift a hundred pounds, every day, until the day you succeed.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice