nothin'

Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.

Paul Newman
Cool Hand Luke

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.


Under the Harvest Moon
Carl Sandburg

This morning

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart,

Peonies [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Citizenship in a Republic
Teddy Roosevelt

I'm so

I'm so nothing, I'm so everything -

Summer [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Shall I cry out in anger,

Those I have loved, though now beyond my view,
Have given form and quality to my being.
They have led me into the wide universe
I continue to inhabit, and their presence
Is more real to me than their absence.


Shall I cry out... [excerpt]
Rabbi Morris Adler

your breath alone

The perfume of your body dulls my sense.
I want nor wine nor weed; your breath alone
Suffices.


Flower of Love [excerpt]
Claude McKay

Bar Napkin Sonnet #11

Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I could do was let him kiss me, hard
and soft and any way you want it, beast
and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards—
and when his friend showed up I felt so warm
and generous I let him kiss me too.
His buddy asked me if it was the worm
inside that makes me do the things I do.
I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one
I ate? The one that eats at me alone?


Bar Napkin Sonnet #11
Moira Egan

Contigo mi vida,

Contigo mi vida,
Quiero vivir la vida.
Y lo que me queda de vida,
Queiro vivir contigo.

With you in my life,
I want to live life.
That which remains in life,
I want to live with you.

Suerte
Shakira

Poem

The rose fades
and is renewed again
by its seed, naturally
but where

save in the poem
shall it go
to suffer no diminution
of its splendor

Poem
William Carlos Williams

no house now

Whoever has no house now will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
And wander on the boulevards, up and down...

Autumn Day [excerpt]
Rainer Maria Rilke

on choosing a mate

You can't go with the person who loves you. That means nothing. You have to be with the person who you love.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

to make others happy

To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits -- to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful; in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then to be resigned -- this is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and heart.

The Creed of Science
Robert Ingersoll

wild promise

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world... "Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all..."

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Morgensonne, 1952

Morgensonne, 1952
Edward Hopper

Choose

THE single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose: For we meet by one or the other

Choose
Carl Sandburg

only when you believe it

Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love its strength and joy.

Night Watch
Sergei Lukyanenko

elevate his life

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau

but you're not here

violently happy!
'cause i love you

Violently Happy [excerpt]
Bjork

We read

We read to know we are not alone.

C.S. Lewis

Confession

To say I'm without fear -
It wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I've learned to hide them,
To protect myself
From fulfillment: all happiness
Attracts the Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages -
In the end they have
No emotion but envy.

Confession
Louise Glück

on uniqueness

Don't worry if one person is not showing the same love that someone else has shown you. No two loves are the same.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

on meaning in life

You must have things that you care about. Otherwise you are empty.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

And if we kept traveling west,

...We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

You Shall Know Our Velocity
Dave Eggers