Is it possible for a man to be a good man when he is also a bad man? Is it possible for evil to coexist with goodness and if so do those terms mean anything anymore when they are pushed into such an uncomfortable and perhaps irreconcilable alliance? It may be, I thought, that when good and evil were separated they both became equally destructive; that the saint was as appalling and dangerous a figure as the out-and-out rogue. However, when rightness and wrongness were combined in the right proportions, just so, like whiskey and sweet vermouth, that was what constructed the classic Manhattan cocktail of the human animal (yes, with a splash of bitters and a rub of orange peel, and you can allegorize those elements as you please, and the rocks in the glass as well). But I had never known what to make of this yin-and-yang notion. Maybe the union of opposites to form nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalise away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs. ~ Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

Already high on life, we broke open the long-preserved pack of Afghan Moon and inhaled. At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened as my father had said they would and we understood the secrets of the world. We saw that the world was neither meaningless nor absurd, that in fact it had profound meaning and form, but that form and meaning had been hidden from us until now, concealed in the hieroglyphics and esoterica of power, because it was in the interests of the masters of of the world to hide meaning from all but the illuminated. We understood also that it was up to us to save the planet and that the force that would save the planet was love. … Tonight was for love, said the Afghan Moon, tonight was for the celebration of living bodies and for saying farewell to the lost bodies of departed loved ones, but after the sun rose in the morning, there would be no time to lose. ~ Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music—the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words—all evoking and playing upon each other. ~ Alan Watts

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. ~ Patti Smith

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— C.S Lewis, Living in an Atomic Age (1948), Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. ~ Alice Munro, Selected Stories, 1986 - 1994

Life’s too short to play small with your talents. You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You’ve been built to achieve master-work level projects, designed to realise unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet. You have it in you to reclaim sovereignty over your primal greatness in a civilisation that has become fairly uncivilised. To restore your nobility in a global community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self. Your personal leadership requires — no, demands — that you stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital services ad restructure your life to model mastery, exemplify decency and relinquish the self-centeredness that keeps good people limited. The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic —that staggers your marketplace by the quality of its originality as well as from the helpfulness it provides. While you do so, my recommendation is that you also create a private life strong in ethics, rich with marvelous beauty, and unyielding when it comes to the protection of your inner peace. This, my friends, is how you soar with the angels. And walk alongside the gods. ~ The Spellbinder | Robin Sharma, The 5am Club

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles. ~ Gertrude Stein

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. ~ Maria Popova

You have to think of your brand as a kind of myth. A myth is a compelling story that is archetypal, if you know the teachings of Carl Jung. It has to have emotional content and all the themes of a great story: mystery, magic, adventure, intrigue, conflicts, contradiction, paradox. ~ Deepak Chopra