I object to being told that I am saving daylight
when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind...
At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme,
I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism,
eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier,
to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.
Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Join the union, girls,
and together say
Equal Pay for Equal Work.
Susan B. Anthony, The Revolution
Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—
I got your Letter, and the Birds—
The Maples never knew that you were coming—
I declare - how Red their Faces grew—
But March, forgive me—
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue—
There was no Purple suitable—
You took it all with you—
Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come
That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame—
Emily Dickinson
Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested [physicist] Richard [Feynman]. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.
I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"
I hesitated. "I'm sad because you're going to die."
"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."
We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face.
"Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home."
And so he did.
Danny Hillis, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, longnow.org
The willow which bends to the tempest
often escapes better than the oak which resists it.
Walter Scott, The Works of Sir Walter Scott: The pirate
It’s not always easy to tell the difference
between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens, Letters
Waiting is one of the great arts.
Margery Allingham, The Tiger In The Smoke
We cannot live securely in a world which is not our own,
in a world which is interpreted for us by others.
An interpreted world is not a home.
Part of the terror is to take back our own listening,
to put our ears to our own inner voices, to see our own light,
which is our birthright, and comes to us in silence.
Hildegard of Bingen, Warrior of Light,
by Elaine Bellezza, Gnosis magazine, 1991
You have this need to be famous,
my therapist said, but I think
you should get a job first. If
you look at all the famous people,
they all had jobs. George Bush
never looks like he’s doing anything,
but he was once a President. You have
to start from somewhere. Otherwise
you’ll be famous inside
your own head, but so is everyone else.
Hal Sirowitz
This story might be half-apocryphal, but apparently on May 19th, 1780, the sky went dark over Connecticut. We don’t know what blotted out the sun—probably some forest fires burning nearby—but the deeply Christian Connecticuters figured it was a sign the End Times had come. At the State House in Hartford, several senators suggested that everybody should return home and prepare to meet their Maker.
Amidst the commotion, Senator Abraham Davenport of Stamford stood up and said: "I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought."
Candles were brought, and the work continued.
Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History blog
Childhood may be defined as the age of play;
therefore some children are never young,
and some adults are never old.
Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War and God
Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. … We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play — and by “we” I mean society — in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
A great many worries can be diminished
by realizing the unimportance
of the matter which is causing the anxiety.
Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness
Old age is like a plane flying through a storm.
Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.
You can’t stop the plane, you can’t stop the storm, you can’t stop time.
So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely.
Golda Meir, 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci
There are many outside the church who seem to be inside,
there are many inside the church who seem to be outside...
There are some whom the church has whom God has not,
there are some whom God has whom the church has not.
Attributed to St. Augustine
Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.
Ted Kooser
His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools —
the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans —
and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase,
“You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him,
and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations,
though friends are, if possible, an event more fair.
Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil, Simone Weil: A Life
Michael: My father's no different than any other powerful man –
any man who's responsible for other people, like a senator or a president.
Kay: You know how naïve you sound?
Michael: Why?
Kay: Senators and presidents don't have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who's being naïve, Kay?
Dialogue from The Godfather movie, Francis Ford Coppola & Mario Puzo
God is Love, let heaven adore him;
God is Love, let earth rejoice;
let creation sing before him
and exalt him with one voice.
God who laid the earth’s foundation,
God who spread the heaven above,
God who breathes through all creation:
God is Love, eternal Love.
God is Love; and Love enfolds us,
all the world in one embrace:
with unfailing grasp God holds us,
every child of every race.
And when human hearts are breaking
under sorrow’s iron rod,
then we find that selfsame aching
deep within the heart of God.
God is Love; and though with blindness
sin afflicts all human life,
God’s eternal loving-kindness
guides us through our earthly strife.
Sin and death and hell shall never
o’er us final triumph gain;
God is Love, so Love for ever
o’er the universe must reign.
Timothy Rees
The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren’t really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.
Kay Ryan
Anxiety is the unwillingness to play
even when you know the odds are for you.
Courage is the willingness to play
even when you know the odds are against you.
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin
Most people can bear adversity;
but if you wish to know what a man really is give him power.
This is the supreme test.
Robert G. Ingersoll, speaking of Abraham Lincoln
There are many who stumble in the noon-day,
not for want of light, but for want of eyes.
John Newton, The Works of the Rev. J. Newton
It’s a moral issue. A moral issue.
And to me that’s always much more interesting than a real issue.
Elaine May in a routine with Mike Nichols
Call me a romantic,
But I believe that there will be a future,
and indeed a long future, beyond 2027.
History will not end.
We need to cultivate the skill
of exact thinking in demented times.
Dan Wang, December 2025 blog post
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God
T.S. Eliot, from The Rock
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Margaret Atwood
I avoid looking forward or backward,
and try to keep looking upward.
This is not the time to regret, dread, or weep.
What I have and ought to do
is very distinctly laid out for me;
what I want, and pray for, is strength to perform it.
Charlotte Bronte, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell
When I’m not sure whether something is okay to do,
I find it helps to give it the worst spin
in the bluntest language possible,
then judge it from there.
Carolyn Hax, Washington Post advice column, January 2026
The Story of Tony Cellini
When Kiryas V’Yoel Moshe — Satmar Bungalows — opened in Sullivan County more than 20 years ago, the Thompson town supervisor was an unabashed, raging anti-Semite named Tony Cellini. As chief executive of the municipality, he had full control over most important town functions, and made no secret of his intent to block Jews at every turn. Cellini explicitly declared his contempt of Jews numerous times, and flexed every form of interference he could — preventing applications to open a grocery or even denying permits for minor repairs.
A group of leading askanim gathered to strategize removing Cellini from office. At the meeting, a young Moishe Indig asserted that political opposition was the wrong approach. “It’s impossible to get rid of him, he’s too well-liked in town,” he told the others. “The only solution is to work on winning him over.”
Indig was laughed out of the room — the idea was as farfetched as convincing Yahya Sinwar to open a kollel.
Indig took matters into his own hands.
He went to the municipal building to try to talk to Cellini, and stood in the doorway of his office like Esther Hamalkah waiting to be noticed. When Cellini looked up, he began screaming and cursing at the young chassid, shouting about who let the Jew in. He personally threw the visitor out of the entire complex, shouting obscenities all the way.
Undeterred, a few days later, Indig waited for Cellini in the parking lot and tracked him to Walmart, where he schemed a “chance” encounter in an aisle.
The town supervisor didn’t recognize the Jew he had recently kicked out of his office, and Indig launched into his spiel without hesitation. “Hey, aren’t you Tony Cellini, the Tony Cellini, town supervisor?” he said, with obvious excitement. “So nice to see you here… the Jewish community here owes you such a big thank-you!”
Caught off guard, Cellini asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Indig plowed ahead, “it’s all thanks to you that we can enjoy summers with our families in this beautiful environment. You work so hard to keep the town nice and pleasant. All the surrounding towns are slummy dumps, but this one is gorgeous. Thank you! And you recruited Walmart to come here, which is so helpful….”
Who doesn’t warm up to a little flattery? Cellini sure did. “Yeah, and I got Home Depot to open here as well, and wait till you see what I’m working on next!” he agreed.
Pressing his advantage, Indig moved in for the snare. “You know, I think you should run for governor,” he said. “If you can accomplish so much on the local level, you are the right person the state needs to fix all the problems. Why waste your time in this little town? Our community will get behind you.”
Indig kept this up for a while, buttering up the nonplussed politician, until he was ready for the hook. “We must make an event honoring you for your accomplishments,” he said. “In our community, gratitude is mandatory. Let’s celebrate and break bread together!”
Moments later, Cellini was ushering Indig into his office — the same one he had tossed him out of days before — so that he could check his calendar and plan the party. He gave the askan his personal cell number, and set about inviting the sheriff and other officials to the event.
Indig walked out and called the other askanim. “In two weeks, we’re having a breakfast at my place honoring Tony Cellini.”
“Who?”
“Tony Cellini. You know… the anti-Semite?”
Cellini loved the breakfast gala, and barriers began to come down one after another. Indig took him to the local camp, where carefully prepped kids serenaded the supervisor. Next, they went to the Bobover institutions for similar pomp and circumstance.
One thing led to another, and Cellini became the greatest ally and oheiv Yisrael in town history. For the next twelve years, he eagerly helped wherever he could. After retiring from public office, he became a consultant for the Jewish community. He would freely start sentences with phrases like, “back when I was an anti-Semite…” or “We have to talk to so-and-so, he’s still an anti-Semite….”
Cellini’s close friendship with Indig continued until the former supervisor died several years ago. When Indig’s late wife was hospitalized, he chauffeured Indig’s family to and from the hospital, constantly offering to help in any way possible. During Tony’s own terminal illness and hospitalization at Mount Sinai Hospital (where Indig served as chaplain) for months before he died, the askan visited him daily. Cellini noticed that no one else visited or called — not even the current Thompson town supervisor, whom he had installed in office. “Moishe, I only have three true friends in the world,” he said one day. “You, Rabbi Hager, and David Walter, my three rabbis.”
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Jewish Family Weekly, Issue 1088)
The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,
my home is where we make our meeting-place,
and love whatever I shall touch and read
within that face.
Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;
peace to look, life to listen and confess,
freedom to find to find to find
that nakedness.
Muriel Rukeyser
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters
When you overstate, the reader will be instantly on guard,
and everything that has preceded your overstatement
as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in his mind
because he has lost confidence in your judgment or your poise.
E.B. White, The Elements of Style
It is well to remember that the entire universe,
with one trifling exception,
is composed of others.
John Andrew Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses
The man who never alters his opinion
is like standing water,
and breeds only reptiles of the mind.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
If you can find a path with no obstacles,
it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
Frank A. Clark, The Country Parson cartoon caption
I believe we must take our subtle spiritual intuitions seriously
and view them as the quintessence that underlies the ordinary world.
The rejection of the sacred is the fundamental reason for our existential discontent.
“I love you" and “I am sorry” spoken into the universe
are two sentiments forever worth declaring.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #323
Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don’t try to convince me that
There’s something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don’t last.
And it’s not true that
It’s all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be attained
Only if one’s surroundings are good
It’s not true that good exists
I’m sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It’s all beyond my control
And you’ll never in a million years hear me say
Today was a very good day
Now read it from bottom to top, the other way,
And see what I really feel about my day.
Chanie Gorkin
Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
A complex system designed from scratch never works
and cannot be patched up to make it work.
You have to start over with a working simple system.”
John Gall, Systemantics
He who fears he shall suffer,
already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May, Foreword to Existential-Phenomenological Alternatives for Psychology
You know my friends, there comes a time
when people get tired of being trampled
by the iron feet of oppression.
There comes a time my friends,
when people get tired of being plunged
across the abyss of humiliation,
where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair.
There comes a time when people get tired
of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July
and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
There comes a time.
Martin Luther, King Jr., Montgomery Bus Boycott speech, December 1955
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.
James Weldon Johnson
Fernando Pessoa
Debate doesn't really change things.
It gets you bogged in deeper.
If you can address or reopen the subject with something new,
something from a different angle, then there is some hope....
Seamus Heaney, Paris Review 1997
Maybe truly understanding the world requires participating in it.
James Somers, Open Mind, The New Yorker, November 2025
Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions
in which we all collaborate willingly.
The trouble is, we forget after a while
that they are illusions and
we are deeply shocked
when reality is torn down around us.
J.G. Ballard, The Guardian interview 2003
The way we see the problem is the problem.
Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
I suspect the most we can hope for,
and it's no small hope,
is that we never give up,
that we never stop giving ourselves permission
to try to love and receive love.
Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me: A Novel
Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live.
He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions
about who God is and who God loves.
Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendell Berry
We are too much in awe of those who succeed
and far too dismissive of those who fail.
And, most of all, we become much too passive.
We overlook just how large a role we all play—
and by “we” I mean society—
in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
If nothing matters,
it should not matter that nothing matters,
and yet it does matter.
Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
A memory is a complicated thing,
a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are.
They deserve respect.
If you get the right ones in the right order,
you might nudge the world a little or make a poem
that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
You live your life at the time you live it —
you don't have much of an overview
when what's happening to you is still happening.
John Irving, In One Person: A Novel
True perfection consists in the love of God and our neighbour,
and the better we keep both these commandments, the more perfect we shall be.
Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle
For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear--
When you are the hammer, Strike.
Edwin Markham
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes,
then you are making new things, trying new things,
learning, living, pushing yourself,
changing yourself, changing your world.
You’re doing things you’ve never done before,
and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
Neil Gaiman, 2009 blog post
Be at war with your vices,
at peace with your neighbors,
and let every new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack