Some cool quotations

When I was in graduate school, I walked into my mentor's office for the first time and was overwhelmed by the quotes he had on his walls. Every wall had postcards, slips of paper, yellow-lined paper, hand-written and typed quotes. It was a bit like a scene from A Beautiful Mind, and I didn't know what to make of it.

Now I'm about at the same age my mentor was then, and I, too, am obsessed with quotes. I love coming across words written by someone else that resonate with something important inside me, words and ideas that support, clarify, or amplify things I, too, have been thinking. I spend whole days ruminating on quotes. Through my years as a teacher, I have taught the same poems enough times that lines float through my mind.

I am not, like some people, able to recall relevant quotes when I need them. I can't even remember authors' names half the time. But right now, I feel like reading is taking a walk through a gorgeous landscape, and the quotes are the things I simply must take a picture of to remember and think about later.

So having said that, here are a few quotes I've really enjoyed recently.

from Ranier Maria Rilke:

All tenderness you may feel for your childhood is good.

*

There are the hurts. And, always, the hardships.
And there's the long knowing of love--all of it
unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:
these are better unsaid.

*

How delicious it is to wake up in a place where no one, no one in the world, guesses where you are. Sometimes I have stopped spontaneously in towns along my way only to taste the delight that no living being can imagine me there. How much that added to the lightness of my soul!




from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson