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

The task is… not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

—Erwin Schrödinger

Relax wild one. It’s not your job to be everything everyone needs, and you don’t have to be impressive to be loved. Stop trying so hard. Just show up … and be real with the world. That is enough.

— Brooke Hampton

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

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

— Willam Martin

“Absence of emotions neither causes nor promotes rationality. […] In order to respond reasonably one must first of all be ‘moved,’ and the opposite of emotional is not ‘rational,’ whatever that may mean…”

— Arendt, ‘On Violence’, in Crises of the Republic