DICHOS/QUOTES

Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.” Nuestra noción sobre la felicidad nos atrapan. Olvidamos que son solo ideas. Nuestra idea de la felicidad puede impedirnos ser realmente felices. No vemos la oportunidad de ser alegres que está justo frente a nosotros cuando estamos atrapados en la creencia de que la felicidad debe tomar una forma particular.

To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself." Ser hermoso significa ser tú misma. No necesitas ser aceptada por otras. Necesitas aceptarte a ti misma.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. Cuidarme a mí misma no es autocomplacencia. Es autoconservación, y ese es un acto político.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

You are under no obligation to be the person you were 5 minutes ago.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them in a firmament of conventions and opinions. But poets make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the tear. But then the crowd of imitators come and repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the tear with opinions. Thus other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

When your mind is quiet you see the way other minds project.

You can't be what you can't see.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.