10/10/11

Inspiration.

Just For Now - Imogen Heap

There are very few thing in this life that I find inspirational. I don't really put much faith in humanity, which I realize is pessimistic. I guess this is why what I find inspirational are revolutionary ideas.

The Dog Days are Over - Florence + The Machine

Whenever I read, whether for a class or for leisure, I feel like I become immersed in each different authors ideas, especially if I agree with them. My favorite kinds of literary compositions to read (once I force myself to start reading them) are generally intellectually challenging ones like Emerson's or Thoreau's old-school essays.

Baby Boomer - Monsters of Folk

Fiction-wise, if you're looking for something philosophically challenging, take a whack at Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (although I would only recommend this to readers who can buy themselves a ticket to an R-rated movie).

The River of Dreams - Billy Joel

Anyways, whenever I read, if a particular idea or quote strikes me, I've been trying to write them down to remind me of the inspiration the work in general gave me at the time I read it. So, to give you a better idea of my taste in literature and what inspires me, in hopes that these ideas will inspire you as well, I've decided to share with you my personal collection of favorite quotes thus far.

I Need - Ben Sollee

"No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone." - Mitch Albom

"Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us...why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into the masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also...To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty and in the same field, it beholds every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

World At Our Feet - Joe Brooks

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - Henry David Thoreau

Why Do You Let Me Stay Here - She & Him

"To see and hear people lie and to be called a fool yourself for putting up with the lie; to endure insults, humiliations, not daring to say openly that you're on the side of the honest, free people, and to have to lie yourself, to smile, and all that for a crust of bread, a warm corner, some little rank that's not worth a penny--no, it is impossible to live like that any longer!" - Anton Chekhov

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at a post office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important hearty communications." - Henry David Thoreau

Rest - Parts & Labor

"Life should be portrayed not the way it is and not the way it's supposed to be--but the way it appears in dreams." - Anton Chekhov

"Union is only possible to those who are units...A profound thinker has said 'no married woman can represent the female world, for she belongs to her husband. The idea of a woman must be represented by a virgin.' But this is the very fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him." - Margaret Fuller

Hero/Heroine - Boys Like Girls

"The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept in silence sealed; the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures whose charms were broken if revealed." - Charlotte Bronte

"Interpretation is the revenge of intellect upon art...in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." - Susan Sontag

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. - C.S. Lewis

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it was, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? - Lewis Carroll

There's Hope - India.Arie