"You are not here to merely make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."
–– Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), American politician
via: Commonplace Book 2006-2009, 2007, p. 88.
"Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up to the step; we must step up the stairs."
–– Václav Havel (1936-2011), Czech playwright, poet, statement, political dissident
via: Commonplace Book 2006-2009, 2007, p. 79.
"German philosopher Walter Benjamin was an inveterate collector of books. He also tirelessly collected quotations from books in little notebooks with black covers. Quotations became the very center of his written work. They were the way he entered into the vision of another's work and listened to tradition. To Benjamin, to achieve the essential in the quotation was to bring the truth to light."
–– Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-born American Jewish writer and political philosopher re: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, essayist
Source: Quote from Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 58. found in Anne West. Mapping: The Intelligence of Artistic Work. 2011. p. 196.
via: Sketchbook 18, 2012, p. 122.
"To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality."
–– bell hooks, pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021), American writer, academic, & activist
via Sketchbook 26, 2022, p. 134
