Category: Thought of the Day

"Artists are more envied than millionaires."

—Saul Bellow (from a really awesome book I'm reading.)

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood."

—Daniel Burnham

(via The New Yorker, on the eve of SXSW 2009).

"No man controls his fortune. It controls him."

—Amadeo Pietro Giannini, founder of Bank of America (via the BCC's Radio 4 program Point of View)

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

—Anton Chekhov (via The Writer's Almanac)

"So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky
As someone told me lately –
Everyone deserves the chance to fly."

—Wicked

"To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not."

—Virginia Woolf (via The Writer's Almanac)

"Pessimism is a luxury of good times … In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence." (via TED Talks).

—Evelin Lindner

"Nobody said not to go."

—Emily Hahn (via The Writer’s Almanac).

“I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

—Leonard Bernstein

(from a simply awesome look at Bernstein’s compositional career in The New Yorker).

"We have keys to all doors.
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a
voyage of discovery,
Guided each by a private chart, of which there is
no duplicate.
The world is all gates, all opportunities,
Strings of
tension waiting to be struck."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson