Sublime

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to

Zuiker’s efforts point toward a definition of meaningful and valuable work that doesn’t require a frenetic busyness. Its magic instead becomes apparent at longer timescales, emanating from a pace that seems, in comparison with the relentless demands of high-tech pseudo-productivity, to be, for lack of a better word, almost slow.

In order to become the best, you must embrace the art of quitting. Those who become the best don’t hold on to any 80 percent activity or identity for too long.

Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

And this simple pairing—walking and carrying—is surprisingly effective. Things get put away much more easily, without a lot of special effort or extra trips. I’m walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, so I bring my giant mug. I’m walking from the front door to my bedroom, so I bring the book that needs to be shelved. It seems like a small thing,

The projects that today most urgently need salvaging are low-income housing projects. Their failures drastically affect the everyday lives of many people, especially children. Moreover, because they are too dangerous, demoralizing and unstable within themselves, they make it too hard in many cases to maintain tolerable civilization in their vicinit

Or consider the line drawn by Mr. Jaffe at the candy store around our corner—a line so well understood by his customers and by other storekeepers too that they can spend their whole lives in its presence and never think about it consciously. One ordinary morning last winter, Mr. Jaffe, whose formal business name is Bernie, and his wife, whose forma