“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”

“Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge. This kind of patience was once cultivated by the reading of dense,... See more

“The wealthy tend to overemphasise the importance of lifestyle while sweeping under the rug the actual cost of tinkering with your facial chemistry”

“The moral halo around ‘good skin’ isn’t a coincidence...it’s not that we think having bad skin is a moral failing. It’s that we think poverty is.”

“every day you have enough. More than enough. Everything needed to sustain life is already here”

“I can discover something in the universe, but if I didn’t do it, somebody else after me will discover that exact same thing. Whereas in the arts, what you create, no one who was ever born before you or will be born from your death onwards will ever compose exactly the same thing you did. So in that sense art is a unique expression of the... See more

“The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it.”

“It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences which can create new problems”

“The more he forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualises himself”