Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theatre, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

— IAM, but…

In measurable terms my actions hardly matter. But feeling tiny does not have to end at why bother?

— Wendy Jehanara Tremayne. “The Good Life Lab”

It is no sign of wellness to be well adjusted to a sick society.

— Krishnamurti

Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

— Rumi

Love is the merchandise which all the world demands; if you store it in your heart, every soul will become your customer.

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

We have so largely lost track of the sacred that we are even becoming incapable of committing sacrilege.

— Gregory Bateson (Angels Fear)

Culture preserves the map and the record of past journeys so that no generation will permanently destroy the route.
The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

— Wendell Berry

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

— Bertrand Russell

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully you leave something good behind.
— Anthony Bourdain

But in many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone - it is also prophecy.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass)

Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.

— Nathan W. Morris