As part of the business of everything being made a commodity, the shop window has taken the place of the altar-piece and the painting. Tens of thousands look into these windows and wonder. Here are the modern still-lives and the modern heroes and heroines. The function of the shop-window tableau is really the same as that of sculpture for the Greeks, or frescoes for the Italians of the Renaissance. These works appealed because they embodied the hopes, the ideals, the potentiality of most of the people who looked at them. Today there is only one common ideal, created and fostered by commerce: it is the principle that Only what you haven’t yet got is worth having.

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

(the book was published in 1956. Right before Andy Warhol began experimenting with putting paintings he made for shop windows into galleries.)

Not all cultures in the world share the dominant Western view of a secularized, utilitarian, depersonalized nature. The existence of alternative views of the natural environment is important as part of the cultural heritage of humankind. This cultural diversity is akin to biodiversity as the raw material for evolutionarily adaptive responses

— Fikret Berkes (Sacred Ecology)

You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.

— Paulo Coelho

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for freedom of thought which they seldom use

— Soren Kierkegaard

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities

— Wade Davis

I am beginning to recognise that real happiness isn’t something large and looming on the horizon ahead but something small, numerous and already here. The smile of someone you love, a descent breakfast, the warm sunset. Your little everyday joys, all lined up in a row.

— Beau Taplin

Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation” — that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. …within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. …But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

— Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Scientists come in two varieties, hedgehogs and foxes. I borrow this terminology from Isaiah Berlin (1953), who borrowed it from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. Archilochus told us that foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are broad, hedgehogs are deep. Foxes are interested in everything and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are only interested in a few problems that they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvellous universe. Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble were hedgehogs. Charley Townes, who invented the laser, and Enrico Fermi, who built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, were foxes. It often happens that foxes are as creative as hedgehogs. The laser was a big discovery made by a fox. The general public is misled by the media into believing that great scientists are all hedgehogs. Some periods in the history of science are good times for hedgehogs, other periods are good times for foxes. The beginning of the twentieth century was good for hedgehogs. The hedgehogs—Einstein and his followers in Europe, Hubble and his followers in America—dug deep and found new foundations for physics and astronomy. When Fermi and Townes came onto the scene in the middle of the century, the foundations were firm and the universe was wide open for foxes to explore. Most of the progress in physics and astronomy since the 1920s was made by foxes.

— Freeman J. Dyson, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

— Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse