Unlike the prose of letters, pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry the imagination is allowed to travel between fact… - Maria Popova

"Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only "for a time"? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity."

What invigorated Maria Mitchell that evening, and what would drive her for the remaining decades of her life, was not the king’s medal, nor the luster of worldwide recognition, but the sheer thrill of discovery — the ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense
monolith of the unknown, that elemental motive force of every sincere scientist.

We know from the now-iconic 1970s Good Samaritan study that the single greatest predictor of uncaring, unkind, and uncompassionate behavior, even among people who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others, is a perceived lack of time — a feeling of being rushed. The sense of urgency seems to consume all of our other concerns — it is the razor’s blade that severs our connection to anything outside ourselves, anything beyond the task at hand, and turns our laser-sharp focus of concern onto the the immediacy of the self alone.