It must be those brief moments
when nothing has happened – nor is going to.
Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean
beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days.
There, sometimes, you meet your own heart
like someone you’ve never known.
~ Hans Børli
(Happiness…?)
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
(Of Human Bondage)
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Walden)
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
~ William Wordsworth
(Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie)
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe;” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
~ Albert Einstein
(Mathematical Circles: Mathematical Circles Adieu & Return to Mathematical Circles)
I should not dare to be so sad
So many Years again —
A Load is first impossible
When we have put it down —
The Superhuman then withdraws
And we who never saw
The Giant at the other side
Begin to perish now.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1233)
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
~ Arthur Eddington
(Our Place in the Universe)
We’ve all got stardust in our bones.
~ Ben Harper
♫ (Get It Like You Like It) ♫
Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are built of star stuff.
~ Carl Sagan
(Cosmos)
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
~ Joni Mitchell
♫ (Woodstock) ♫
Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there’s probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.
~ Alix Kates Shulman
(Drinking the Rain)
Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness … the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.
~ Teilhard de Chardin
(The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World)
It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
~ Mark Twain
(Tom Sawyer, Detective)
We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Journal)
My slowly growing pysanky collection…
I made two of the (less prominent) Ukrainian Easter eggs myself several years ago when Aunt Delorma and I took a workshop. It’s NOT easy!!! Can you guess which ones?