Stress management and mindfulness meditation advices? By pinning these quotes on your living room wall, bedroom closet, or office desk, you’ll always have something to look up to for motivation even when everything else doesn’t seem to be working out. But our 50 inspiring aesthetic quotes are not all about helping you appreciate your inner beauty or motivating you during adversity. Some of these quotes are also an embodiment of satire at its best. You can apply them on social media when you want to sound sarcastic, or in solemn conversations to wittily convey a deep and sensitive message. What’s more – you can even share these quotes with your near and dear ones as a reminder of how deeply you care about their existence.

Studies suggest that meditation functions on specific parts of the brain that are known to create depression, anxiety, and stress responses. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the ‘me-center’ of the mind gets into overdrive during the depression and anxiety states. As a result, we experience more negative feelings about ourselves and keep sabotaging our self-esteem cluelessly. Amygdala, or the ‘fear center’ is a part of the limbic system that creates fear responses and activates the fight-or-flight system in the body, that consumes a significant portion of our energy, leaving us to feeling tired and weary for the rest of the day. During the depression and anxious states, the ‘me-center’ and the ‘fear center’ work simultaneously, causing a chain of reactions, as illustrated below.

Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain — although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators. “We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” said study author Florian Kurth. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

Before, I was constantly running things through the lens of theory and philosophy, creating multiple dramatic voices in the text. I am still thinking about the phenomenology of romance, but the problem of romance is something that’s passed to you as a child, through the family, through the entire world around you. It’s something I’ve always known so intimately, so maybe that’s why in addressing it. There’s a softness, there’s lyricism. I was beating that out of the poems before. I haven’t gone back to check, but I think there’s only one hyacinth in Porn Carnival. And no one gets bored to death by what existential crises overtake a body in the organic co-op of whatever town Bard College is in. It isn’t that type of book. You get lines such as “these girls were at the wrong orgy,” titles such as “In the Heart-Shaped Jacuzzi of my Soul.” Which isn’t to say it’s all so… rowdy. On god, she reminds me most of Octavio Paz. Still, it’s a book about sex work, mainly. See many more details at poem touch of the master’s hand. Alliteration involves the use of two or more words that begin with the same sound. For example, “The drizzling, drippy drain drove me crazy.” Alliteration is a great way to grab the reader’s attention at a particular moment in the poem. It also provides the poet an opportunity to describe things in a creative way that is memorable to the reader.

There’s a quote in an interview you did about the idea of poetry being inherently queer. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. Well, you can’t talk about poetry without talking about Sappho. Are your shorter poems inspired by Sapphic fragments? Completely. Poetry is open to the innumerable differences of the reader, and the way it falls in the reader’s ears, there is that flirtation there, and that act of invitation, which is to me inherently queer. I can’t help but think of poetry in the tradition of Sappho—how can she not be a part of any love poem that you’re writing? Then I was wondering if every poem was a love poem. That also might just be me unable to write anything other than love poems because of my belief in romance that I can’t undo in myself, which I want to play with and intellectualize. What does love look like to you, intellectually? For me, being in love is simply having someone who is a comrade, sharing the same values, sharing a same sense of beauty, sharing a same sort of joie de vivre or love of art, being aligned. That’s what being in love is.

Surrounded by the skyscrapers and glass high-rises of Central is the older Court of Final Appeal: a neo-classical building that was opened in 1912 under British rule as the Supreme Court. Then, in 1985 it was converted into the Hong Kong Legislative Council, before reverting back to its original purpose as the Court Final of Appeal in 2015. One of a scant number of surviving historical edifices in Central, the building has a statue of blindfolded Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, above its main entrance.

Perhaps the most amazing benefit of meditation is that it has the capability to reduce mental and physical pain better than morphine. Yep, you read that right. That’s a pretty incredibly scientific finding. Traditionally, the goal of meditation is to reach Enlightenment, or a state of perfect happiness and understanding. Can you reach enlightenment by meditating? Who’s to say? Many people say yes, although science still doesn’t have an answer.