Life is like riding a bicycle

A mixed mailbag

Photo by Ben Meyer, 1933

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Albert Einstein
Letter to his son
5th February 1930

(From Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.)

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It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.

Rachel Carson
Letter to the Washington Post
1953

(From Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson.)

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I feel the moment has come for me to tell you, at length, that according to me, you behave like a shit.

François Truffaut
Letter to Jean-Luc Godard
15th May 1973

(From Dear Friend You Must Change Your Life by Ada Bronowski.)

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Fan letter to Gregory Peck, 1978. (Gregory Peck Papers at the Margaret Herrick Library.)

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Two Top Tips from 50 to 16:

1) Don’t EVER EVER EVER bother to go on a diet. I know you’re obsessed and have that awful thing of standing in the 6th form canteen trying to choose between a yoghurt & a breathe of fresh air (whilst wanting chips & a cheese salad). Don’t sweat it. Eat regularly, try & avoid rubbish and never diet. You’ll end up the same size anyway, so drop it girl, & drop it NOW. Believe me — nobody cares. Diets are the best way of confusing your metabolism for the rest of your life. Just be you & get on with it, I cannot tell you how much time & energy you’ll save & how much happier you’ll be. 

2) When he says he doesn’t love you, believe him. He doesn’t.

Emma Thompson
Letter to her 16-year-old self
29th May 2009

(From Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self by Joseph Galliano.)

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I wish you were a Kangaroo and had a pouch for small Kangaroos to creep to.

Virginia Woolf
Letter to Violet Dickinson
4th June 1903

(From Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection.)

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The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Edward Abbey
Letter to Moab Times-Independent
Summer 1988

(From Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, edited by David Petersen.)

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Steve Jobs to M. L. N. Varon, 1983. (Sold at auction in 2021 for $479,939.)

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I love gazing into things. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is, for example, to see into a dog, in passing into him, to ease oneself into the dog exactly at his center, the place out of which he exists as a dog, that place in him where God would, so to speak, have sat down for a moment when the dog was complete, in order to watch him at his first predicaments and notions and let him know with a nod that he was good, that he lacked nothing, that no better dog could be made. For a while one can endure being in the middle of the dog, but one has to be sure to jump out in time, before the world closes in around him completely, otherwise one would remain the dog within the dog and be lost to everything else.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to Magda von Hattingberg
1917

(From Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence, edited by Magda von Hattingberg.)

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Before you go…

Diaries of Note, which launched on 1st January, continues apace. Each day, a different diary entry, published on the same day and month that it was originally written. Browse the year so far.