Yi-Fu Tuan

"If each person can achieve greatness, so can each fall into baseness."

"A special target of examination ought to be how societies differ in making room for pauses in the midst of life, for it is during such pauses that individuals are able to appraise the meaning of what they have undergone."

"Words designate, but they also evoke a sense of something, and, when they do, they function as metaphors. ...Metaphors enrich life, making it more vivid."

"Experience takes time and calls for patience."

"To forgive is to erase a past, depriving it of its power to stain the present."

"We have no trouble naming the basic physical needs of food, shelter, and sex, nor the basic social needs of care, respect, and love. Can there also be a spiritual need that goes beyond even love as it is commonly understood to something for which the words that most readily come to mind are goodness, the Good, or God? Absent food, shelter, and sex, we die. Absent care, respect, and love, we live--barely. Absent that deep and insatiable spiritual yearning for the Good that certain stories and fables prefigure? We live, and indeed we may live well, in full, societal approbation and self-congratulatory glow, except, perhaps, in those uncanny moments--the sudden chill in the air, a pinched feeling in the heart, or even a stumble over the curb that reminds us of the abyss beneath the pavement on which we so unconcernedly walk."

"We may speak loosely of a ‘sense of time,’ but there is no such sensory organ. Time is something we experience and construct. Time is experienced--is felt--when we wait, expect, or hope."

"People who have ‘music’ in their souls are fun to be with."

"Unlike a small village, the city speaks loud and clear of history, of being the terminus of a long, cumulative process."

"In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold."

"The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them."

"Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act."