My Quotes Of The Year 2024
"The folks who know the truth aren't talking...The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!" ― Tom Waits
So what do you do in that liminal space between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve? If you’re a geek who collects quotes like me, you compile a list of the best ones, that’s what!
Anyone who knows me will have listened to my rantings about how great the Obsidian app is and how it’s changed the way I do things, made me more organised, inspired, and, dare I use a horrible word, productive.
So whenever I hear or read a great quote, I note it down in my Obsidian vault, and then I compile the best ones together in my weekly note.
Some of these quotes were created this year, some were created centuries ago; the only thing they have in common is that I wrote them down this year. Some of the people are here on Substack, and if I know they’re here I have @-mentioned them. Selecting a quote from someone doesn’t imply, nor preclude, complete or partial endorsement of everything they’ve ever uttered.
I want to also quickly take this opportunity to thank the people I’ve most bounced off here this year, which includes
, , , , , , , , , and very likely others who deserve to be mentioned but have temporarily slipped through the net of my memory for now. I strongly urge everyone to check out the writing of all of the above (except Erin who I don’t believe has published anything here). Thanks to all of you for enriching my life and thinking!You can probably get a pretty good idea of the themes which have preoccupied me this year from the quotes I’ve selected. It’s been a pretty hard year in many ways, but I feel like I’ve learned a hell of a lot and grown massively too.
2025? Bring it on!
So, here we go with the quotes, enjoy!
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”— George Orwell
"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity." ― William S. Burroughs
“Of all the obligations that an author can impose upon himself the most common and doubtlessly most harmful is that of being modern.” ― Jorge Luis Borges
"The basis of modern civilization seems to be a state of collective dissociation linked to generational trauma." ―
"Our cultures in the industrial West are frankly insane, and so people face a difficult choice — they can be well-adjusted to an insane society, which makes them crazy in one way; they can reject their own culture, which makes them crazy in a different way; or they can find some compromise between the two, which makes them crazy in both ways at the same time. It’s not any easy road to walk" ― John Michael Greer
“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” ― Ursula LeGuin
“The more modern a worldview is, the more things it considers dead. The more primitive a worldview the more things it considers alive.” ― Jeffrey Kripal
“If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.” ― George Washington Carver
“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering…. but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” ― James Baldwin
"I bear all the wounds of the battles I avoided" ― Fernando Pessoa
"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” — Tolstoy
"Language is our element as water is the element of fish" ― Marcel Merleau―Ponty
"Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings" ― W.H. Auden
"If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears" — Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian poet)
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” ― Prentis Hemphill
“All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.” ―
"Once you tell someone you love them, you automatically give that person the right to hurt you, and yet you place a trust in them that they won’t tear you apart." — Abhishek Tiwari
"Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Over time, you and your partner have a choice: polish each other into jewels or grind each other into dust." ― Resmaa Menakem
"Marriage can’t work without a psychological guiding of both people. There must be disintegration of ego for the two to combine. The uniting process involves fermentation, amalgamation, disintegration, and putrefaction in their psyches. When I married Jean, I felt it was a crucifixion. The bridegroom does go to the bride as to the cross. The bride gives herself equally. It’s a reciprocal crucifixion. In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship." ― Joseph Campbell
"If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?" ― Rumi
"At the root of all interpersonal issues are either grabby fields or leaky fields" ―
"Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual." ― Leonard Cohen
“Zuzuki―roshi: I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.” ― David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
"In the age―old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.” ― CG Jung
"Are the gods talking to you, or is it just three traumas in a trenchcoat?" ―
“Sometimes contrarianism can be such a strong trait in a person, it bends one into actual bullshit.” ―
"The one thing we all need tattooed on our faces “I apologise for my limitations, i am doing my best, please don't take them personally, they were there before i met you”" ― Rosalind Atkinson (@wholebodyprayer)
"Narcissistic supply is the source of what makes someone feel special, which could be their looks, status, talent, or philosophical insight" ―
"Beauty is not frivolous, it is a way of experiencing the depth of our aliveness" ― Minna Salami
"I don't want to master life, I want life to master me." ―
"A riot is the language of the unheard" ― Martin Luther King
"Meditation is how you jailbreak a human" ―
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher" ― Ambrose Bierce
“The full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion" ― Stanislav Grof
"For an artist, withdrawal [into creative solitude] is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, and hostile. We eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands" — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
“We tend to think that the future happens later, but we're creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.” ― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
"If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is." ―
“Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency” – Aristotle
"What is evil except good, tortured by its own hunger and thirst?" ― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
"The folks who know the truth aren't talking...The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!" ― Tom Waits
“Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all.” ― Shakespeare, King Lear
“Everyone dies, but not everyone has lived.” — Marcus Aurelius
"We don't do things because they're easy. We do things because we thought they were going to be easy" ― Fireship (YouTube channel)
What a marvelous collection of quotes, Guy. Thanks for sharing. They made me feel a little better about all the conflicting emotions, particularly ones brought on by the holidays, that I've been dealing with lately. And thank you for the nod, sir. I am super grateful to have made a connection with you here, and I appreciate you taking the time to read some of my drivel. I wish I could've made it to more of the Rilke meetings; I enjoyed interacting with you there. We should do it again this year! Also, I just downloaded Obsidian!
Thanks for the shoutout! I love this concept too! I totally keep a Notion doc called “Random quotes” and save little tidbit I hear. You’re inspiring me to maybe share it this year!
And I think my fav one from your list that I hadn’t heard before is “Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.” - WH Auden.
👏