Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

— IAM

One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.

— Louise Bourgeois

If I hear myself speaking out loud, the ears with which I hear myself speaking out loud do not listen to me in the same way as the inner ear with which I dare to think those words. And if, when listening to myself, I frequently have to ask myself what I mean, how little others will understand me!

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Cooperation is humanity’s superpower, and the way we have enlarged our circle — from kin, to tribes, to religions, to countries, to the world — is miraculous. But the conditions under which that cooperation have taken hold are delicate, and like everything else, part of the biophysical system in which we live. We are changing that system in ways we do not understand and with consequences we cannot predict.

— Ezra Klein, Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened

Behind every scientific advance there is always a matrix, a mother load of unknowns out of which the new partial answers have been chiseled. But the hungry, overpopulated, sick, ambitious, and competitive world will not wait, we are told, till more is known, but must rush in where angels fear to tread.

—Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear - Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred