“Everyone who knows something about the dangers of reflection and the dangerous walk along the road of reflection also knows that it is dubious when a person, instead of getting out of the tension through resolution and action, becomes productive about his state in tension. Then there is no effort to get out of the state, but reflection fixes the situation for reflection and thereby fixes the man. The more richly thoughts and expressions offer themselves, the more briskly the productivity advances-in the wrong direction-the more dangerous it becomes and the more it hides from the person, concerned that his work, his extremely strenuous work, his very interesting (perhaps also for a third party who has a total view) work, is a work of bogging himself down deeper and deeper. That is, he does not work himself loose but works himself fast and becomes interesting to himself by reflecting on the tension and diverts himself with an utterly piecemeal productivity about detached details, with isolated short articles.”

Introduction to the story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” p. 166
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Introduction, p. 11
Think (1999)

Source: 1854, Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, Second series, Hungry Husbands. Often quoted as The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Also quoted in Chambers dictionary of Quotations, p. 321

Source: Managers Not MBAs (2005), p. 254

Interviewed on Anime Diet http://animediet.net/conventions/the-garden-of-thoughts-an-interview-with-makoto-shinkai
About The Garden of Words

Henry Ward Beecher (1887)

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)