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Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

Moby-Dick by Herman Mellville

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden Lord and master, and cruel remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

At first such changes generally are not welcome.

The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikku Bodhi

I have decided to stick to love... Hate is too great a burden to bear

Martin Luther King, Jr.

What does Kovalyov learn from this terrible trial? Nothing. What is his hero's journey? 'A momentous, miraculous thing happened to me, and I stayed the same throughout, although, at times, I did become rather vexed.'

George Saunders on Nikolai Gogol

Souls on Fire by Elie Wiesel

Moving further from forest to trees, burrowing from macro to micro, it’s worth observing that consciousness itself is a kind of conspiracy. Our construction of self—memories, dreams, projections—is a thing there and not there, a machine raveling it all together by an unknowable and dubious mechanics, hiding crucial facts and features from view, and riddled with fissures and incongruities while proposing a seamless and perfect surface. We have conspirators within ourselves, in the form of our Freudian and Darwinian ghosts, strange operators with no duty of obedience to our daily agendas, our objectives inside the ordinary waking life. What a mess! Then again, why shouldn’t we be as gnarled and obscure as the larger forces manipulating us? Maybe it takes one to know one; perhaps we’re the right tool for the job.

“Knitting Socks for the Beast: On Conspiracy,” by Jonathan Lethem

Right then, in the tub, naked, with my bare foot in her hands, I understood for the first time that to receive requires as much generosity as to give.

Like Being Killed by Ellen Miller

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

“Wait Without Hope” by T.S. Eliot

O my Brother, be not thou a Quack!

The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

Stillest perseverance were our blessedness; not dislocation and alteration,—could they be avoided.

[W]e are confessedly ignorant, nor do we know how ignorant we are.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin

[T]he human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth

We must work diligently and mindfully toward the goal without setting any particular time schedule to reach it. When we are ready, we get there. All we have to do is to prepare ourselves for that attainment.

Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.

“What We Need Is Here” by Wendell Berry

The affirmation of the essential and 'natural' bond between speech and sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depend expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of the Saussurian discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness. What Saussure does not question here is the essential possibility of nonintuition.

Of Grammatology by Jack Derrida, translated by Gayatri Spivak, p. 40

To see the things in a new way that is really difficult, everything prevents one, habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, indolence, everything prevents one, in fact there are very few geniuses in the world.

Picasso by Gertrude Stein

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