Maya > Maya's Quotes

“The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.”
― V.S. Ramachandran

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“Fear clogged human potential.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs

“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
― Betty Friedan

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol

“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.”
― Robert Heinlein

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
― Bob Marley

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
― Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy

“When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood.”
― M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi