"Isn't this the perfect image of the noblest selflessness, and thereby presents an example and a model? It should be inspiring: like them, we are the units of a great social body, like them, we can serve and contemplate death with equanimity, subordinating our individual consciousness to collective consciousness."

“Play always as if in the presence of a master.”

Source : Robert Schumann (1860). “Advice to Young Musicians”, p.10

“Words have incredible power. They can make people's hearts soar, or they can make people's hearts sore.”

“I have cellulite. I admit it. But sometimes I just say, 'Screw it, I am going to wear a bikini.'”

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied: "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way."”

Source : Desert (1908) "God Knows"

“The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced -- that without intelligence we should be brutes -- but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world.”

“White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”

Source : "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh, first appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine (Philadelphia, PA), pp. 10-12, July/August 1989; later quoted in Thomas Norman DeWolf "Inheriting the Trade" (Chapter 4: The Great Folks), www.pbs.org. January 2, 2008.

“The day is dark and cold and dreary; it rains, and the wind is never weary.”

“Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”