No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

— Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…to throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…

— Aldous Huxley

The thing about being historians is that we don’t have to predict the future. We only have to predict the past.
— Michael Kazin

True cultural change doesn’t happen unilaterally. Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit and groups of people. A person ‘of high degree’ in traditional knowledge may find a song in a dream if they are profoundly connected to land, lore, spirit and community. But that song must then be taken up by the people and modified gradually through many iterations before it becomes part of the culture. Besides, that song can only be found through a ritual process developed over millennia by that community. The song itself is not as important as the communal knowledge process that produces it.

Most lasting cultural innovations occur through the demotic—the practices and forms that evolve through the daily lives and interactions of people and place in an organic sequence of adaptation. When these processes are unimpeded by the arbitrary controls and designs of elevated individuals they emerge in ways that mirror the patterns of creation.

— Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

Theories don’t give final true knowledge. Theories give a way of looking. The very word theoria in Greek means theater. It’s sort of a theater in the mind that gives insight. Science is involved in a perceptual enterprise.

— David Bohm on Perception