When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.
- Abraham Heschel
When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.
- Abraham Heschel
Margaret Renkl finds a solution for dealing with our times that is much like Austin Kleon’s.
In recent years, I’ve been looking for a solution to this conundrum. How is it possible to be a well-informed citizen and simultaneously a calm, mostly cheerful, more or less sane human being?
The closest thing I’ve found to a workaround is the right dosing. I follow the news during daylight hours. At night, I read a book.
Sometimes it’s a poetry collection I can finish in an evening. Sometimes it’s a memoir or a thick, juicy novel that will carry me through a week or two. Often it’s an essay collection, a genre which comes with those lovely, built-in stopping places that make it easier to close the book and avert a wrestling match with the clock.
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely “played.”
May Sarton
Letter to Louise Bogan
3rd July 1955
Via Letters of Note
“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”
Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.
David Bowie via philosophical.quote