Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Willa Cather

1873 – 1948 CE

Modern day Lao Tzu

Wonderful novelist with a flare for evoking a deep appreciation for nature and the natural world, Willa Cather championed the values of self-sufficiency, independence, and harmony with nature. Nostalgic for the time when most people lived on farms, she used “the rising and setting of the sun” as a major theme and honored the struggle of exiled immigrants. Infusing meaningfulness and sacred outlook into simple, daily tasks she unknowingly continued the Zen spirit and understanding Lao Tzu wrote about so much longer before.

Eras

Sources

My Ántonia

Unlisted Sources

On Writing

Quotes by Willa Cather (19 quotes)

“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”

from My Ántonia

Chapters: 1. The Unnamed

Themes: Here and Now Art

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“I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

Chapters: 47. Effortless Success

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“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.”

Chapters: 66. Go Low

Themes: Patience

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“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”

Chapters: 61. Lying Low

Themes: Poetry Sex

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“It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?”

Chapters: 63. Easy as Hard

Themes: Golden Rule Enemy

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“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

Themes: Travel

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“Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Chapters: 39. Oneness

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“she still had that something which fires the imagination… that somehow revealed the meaning in common things… to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last… It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

Chapters: 62. Basic Goodness

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“Success is never so interesting as struggle.”

Chapters: 2. The Wordless Teachings

Themes: Success

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“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

Themes: Old Age

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“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

Chapters: 18. The Sick Society

Themes: Problems

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“You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.”

Themes: Inspiration

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“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

from On Writing

Themes: Art Economics

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“The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual: those who were not have been long forgotten.”

from On Writing

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“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter, considerations and purposes which have nothing to do with spontaneous invention.”

from On Writing

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“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country as the water is the sea... the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

from My Ántonia

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“He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication [and] narrowly missed being a great poet... his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift.”

from My Ántonia

Themes: Less is More

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“I found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past... whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompany me through all my new experiences.”

from My Ántonia

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“She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true... a look or gesture somehow revealed the meaning in common things.”

from My Ántonia

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