TED: Alain de Botton

Selfless Giving

"When I was young I thought that a quote by Shakespeare from Julius Caesar was something I wanted said about me, but now I know it really applies to John-- "His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man."

Daddy

TED: Gordon Brown

TED: Barry Schwartz

DWELL: The Bathroom Reinvented

Another Old thought

Existence is like a fine piece of china: all the more beautiful for its delicacy.

Old thought

Our knowledge of the transience of human life can be both liberating and debilitating. While walking through Central Park in November, I marveled at the mall of yellow, orange, and red foliage. Brittle leaves, golden in their old age, dangled from the gray branches that had been their homes for months. I stood on that promenade with the urgent desire to memorize that moment, for with each passing second, another leaf would fall to grace my pathway. For a California girl accustomed to her evergreens, that display of the ephemerality of nature was beautiful in ways I had never experienced. My appreciation for the sight was magnified by my understanding that it all would soon end. I wished to retain this compassion for life, fueled by my knowledge of impermanence, but with my appreciation came fear. I wanted to share the experience with the world, but I knew time would not facilitate my ambition. I longed for eternal autumn.

The Cheese Monkeys

"I decided yes. It was that moment— when the mind, instead of obsessively pacing the prison of its own puzzlement, suddenly, instinctively, deliriously, discovers a way to make wings out of wax and fly the maze."

Chip Kidd

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along. It's an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like "kin", seems to have dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of "enthusiasm," which means literally "filled with theos," or God, or Quality. See how that fits?

A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption."


Robert M. Pirsig

"No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going."


Oliver Cromwell

Rahm Emanuel

"The center of the Emanuel universe was the family dinner table, a boisterous place where all the meaningful issues of the day were hotly debated. While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there "gladatorial," Zeke described it to me as more of a Talmudic debate-- the Jewish tradition of argument where one's opponent is viewed as an ally in the search for truth. "It's a sign of love to take someone's view seriously," says Zeke, who has fostered at NIH a style modeled directly on the Emanuel dinner table; he calls it "combative collegiality."


John Gartner for Psychology Today

Humboldt's Gift V

"It made me think what a tremendous force the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA"


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift IV

"...America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experience as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good-- an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done?"


Saul Bellow

Joni II

"We are stardust,
Billion year old carbon,
We are golden,
Caught in the Devil's Bargain,
And we've got to get ourselves,
Back to the garden."

Mommy

Humboldt's Gift III

"Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster."


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift II

"I had never heard such things about business, its power to petrify the soul."


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift

"And money wasn't what I had in mind. Oh God, no, what I wanted was to do good. I was dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to my early and peculiar sense of existence--sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense, a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense inane and so on. I was quite a nut about such things."



Saul Bellow