quotes
Quotations I've collected (since ~1997.)
Each has been important to me in some way; timely, comical, opening.
Some are grouped by topic or by work, others chronologically with respect to the order I found them, and others not ordered at all.
There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
-- Niels Bohr
Loving ourselves means loving our community. When we are capable of loving ourselves, nourishing ourselves properly, not intoxicating ourselves, we are already protecting and nourishing society. Because in the moment when we are able to smile, to look at ourselves with compassion, our world begins to change. We may not have done anything but when we are relaxed, when we are peaceful, when we are able to smile and not to be violent in the way we look at the system, at that moment there is a change already in the world. -- Thich Nhat Hahn
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-- Buckminster Fuller
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
-- Thomas Merton
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
-- Hillel the Elder
Mystical experience is the mirror image of paranoia. It sees "the universe is a conspiracy organized for my benefit."
-- Andrew Weil, M.D.
Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree; a hazel seed into a hazel tree. A seed of God grows into God.
-- Meister Eckhart
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
-- Emily Dickenson
But the chief ground of Skepticism is that to every reason there is an opposite reason equivalent, which makes us forbear to dogmatize.
-- Sextus Empiricus
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity-- William Butler Yeats
Poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g., the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way.
-- John Cage, (found in Jonathan Williams' "Publishing Bucky's Epic" from The Magpie's Bagpipe)
Our basic knowings are no longer of 'things' and their 'properties,' but of structures -- usually implied structures. In other words, events at the level of nuclear, atomic, and molecular levels, cosmic ray phenomena, and events at the level of the extremely large, as in astrophysics, are not visual experiences, but logical and mathematical derivations from instrument-observations and hypotheses. The inferred structures and events, then, are never directly experienced...
-- S. I. Hayakawa, "The New Landscape in Art and Science"
At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.
-- Alan Watts, The Book
More usual, today, is the fear that death will take us into everlasting nothingness -- as if that could be some sort of experience, like being buried alive forever.
-- Alan Watts, The Book
If an artist is not a Modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a Modernist when he is old, he has no brain.
-- Einojuhani Rautavaara (in a press interview in Philadelphia, April 2000)
It is my belief that music is great if, at some moment, the listener catches 'a glimpse of eternity through the window of time', if the experience is one which Arthur Koestler might call 'the oceanic feeling'. This, to my mind, is the only true justification for all art. All else is of secondary importance.
-- Einojuhani Rautavaara
It's wonderful to be a poet. And the key is maintenance. The universe is a big job, but this is where it pays to be practical. Take good care of yourself.
Remember not to get caught out in the rain with no umbrella. A smile will work, but it won't stop you from getting wet. Letting a smile be your umbrella is only OK once in a while--or you get confused. Let an umbrella be your umbrella; and a smile your smile.
Be an organization man without a gray flannel suit.
Organize the universe.
Be kind to everybody and everything.
Love is at the bottom of the whole concept: that's why it's got colors.
But watch it or you may become a saint. That's a certain color, too. Remember to eat well, and love with the body.
The heart releases a kind of pure oxygen through the whole body: it breathes wonder into all the cells. Love is very healthy.
Be a poet and save the world forever.
And don't forget to take a sweater.
Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water. It'll be here when you get home.
That's the way the universe works.
-- Aram Saroyan, Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'
-- Jack Kerouac, On The Road (Sal)
Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development. What might be called 'industrial capitalism' does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs - the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.
-- Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
-- Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
-- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
This /going it alone/ thing, is very important. Plotinus, the great platonic philosopher, he spoke of the mystical experience as the "flight of the alone to the alone," and in the psychedelic experience there is this issue of surrender: because a lot of people want to diddle with it; they want to be able to say they did it, but they don't ever want to face an actual moment where they put it all on the line. And yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let /it/ lead -- to let it show what it wants to show.
-- Terence McKenna
What's happening is, 8 percent of the world's people use 35 percent of the world's petroleum, and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way. This is nothing more than the manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. It's, you know, we're addicted, they've got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it, we'll break into their house and take it. Because, by god it will go into our good right arm. That's the plan.
-- Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green (1992)
There are many obvious reasons for learning how to relax unnecessary tension. But one that is often overlooked is that such relaxation frees the brain to notice and respond to a broader, more subtle spectrum of data and impressions; of what is actually happening at any moment. It is this increase in perceptual freedom that can be one of our major contributions in promoting vitality and good health in ourselves. Perceptual freedom allows the brain and the other systems of the body to make maximum use of their powers in discerning problems and responding appropriately.
-- Dennis Lewis, Breathing as a Metaphor for Living (1998)
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
-- Albert Einstein
We have to get out of history. History is a con-game run by frightened men and their obedient stooges.
-- Terence McKenna, Gaia and the Archaic Revival
The sunrise of supreme bliss shimmers
in every particle of the universe,
so why not drink a fresh cup of joy every day
and become inspired with new perception?
-- Swami Chidvilasananda in The Yoga of Discipline
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, and artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of phyiscs as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.
-- Thomas Pynchon, V.
If you really are curious about the future, just study the present. Because what we ordinarily see in any present is really what appears in the rearview mirror.
-- Marshall McLuhan, The Best of Ideas, CBC Radio, 1967
Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.
-- Marshall McLuhan
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny invisible loving human forces that work from the individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.
-- William James
If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way.
-- Buddha
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, nonindividual activities that this age forces on all of us.
-- George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1946
The violence that all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their phyiscal bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the phyiscal bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity.
-- Marshall McLuhan, "Violence of the Media," Canadian Forum, 1976
The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploiding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him instantaneously and continuously the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.
-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
I don't know Who -- or what -- put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer /Yes/ to Someone -- or Something -- and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
From that moment I have known what it means "not to look back," and "To take no thought for the morrow."
Led by the Ariadne's thread of my answer through the labyrinth of Life, I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one's life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation. After that, the word "courage" lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me.
-- Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, Whitsunday, 1961
Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean. The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive. In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us -- we /are/ forgiven. But we /cannot/ feel His presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.
-- Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, 1956
The "men of the hour," the self-assured who strut about among us in the jingling harness of their success and importance, how can you let yourself be irritated by them. Let them enjoy their triumph -- on the level to which it belongs.
-- Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, 1956
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.-- Eric Hoffer
For the New Year. I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: Congo, ergo sum. Today everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favorite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today, and what thought first crossed my mind this year-a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful-I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it -- all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity -- but he must love it.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is -- not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Sometimes, when thinking about this, I thought that the idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. The effort of fathoming what is in another's mind creates a distortion of what is seen.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They /know/ it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Narrator)
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attact effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I believe that nothing is unconditionally true, and hence I am opposed to every statement of positive truth and to every man who states it.
-- H.L. Mencken
How we treasure (and admire) the people who acknowledge us!
-- Julie Morgenstern
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.
-- Marilyn Ferguson
To use fear as the friend it is, we must retrain and reprogram ourselves...We must persistently and convincingly tell ourselves that the fear is here--with its gift of energy and heightened awareness--so we can do our best and learn the most in the new situation.
-- Peter McWilliams
You can't breathe for yesterday and you certainly cannot breathe for tomorrow; you can only breathe in the moment, and the moment is rich.
-- Ma Jaya Sati Bhavavati, "Kali Who Swallows the Universe"
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
-- Dale Carnegie
At every moment in every person's life there is work to be done, always work to be done, some of it small, some of it Great. The Great Work, in a sense, always has to do with healing the world, changing the world, and, as a necessary predicate to that, understanding the world. You rise every morning aware that you are called to this work. You won't live to see it finished. But if you can't hear it calling, you aren't listening hard enough. It's always calling, sometimes in a big voice, sometimes in a quiet voice.
-- Tony Kushner
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
-- Carl Schurz
Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
-- Lord Chesterfield
Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.
-- Gertrude Stein, Four in America, 1947
I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, "Ain't that the truth."
-- Quincy Jones
It really doesnt matter if the person who hurt you deserves to be forgiven. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. You have things to do and you want to move on.
-- Real Live Preacher
Trying to understand how consciousness works in the brain while limiting our study entirely to the physical aspects of the brain, is like trying to taste a peach through a microscope.
-- Edward Close, Ph.D.
People must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or
outward, that they can become a proper home for God, wherein God can operate.
-- Meister Eckhart
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
-- Nelson Mandela
The gods do not love men's plans, and the gods do not love success unless it comes by accident. He knew that the gods take their revenge on a man if he be successful through his own efforts.
-- John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Guys, the thing you have to remember is (that) nobody else is paying as much attention to your failures as you are. You're the only ones who are obsessed with the importance of your own life. To everyone else, it's just a blip on the radar screen, so just move on.
-- John Travolta to Jerry Zucker
A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
-- Phyllis Mcginley
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
-- Charlotte Bronte
Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-- Mark Twain
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
-- Christopher Morley
Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style--all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.
-- Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style"
Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumbbells? To dig a vineyard is worthier exercise for men.
-- Marcus Valerius Martialis
Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.
-- Brian Adams
Art may imitate life, but life imitates T.V.
-- Ani DiFranco, "Superhero"
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
--Mignon McLaughlin
Be kind - Remember every one you meet is fighting a battle - everybody's lonesome.
-- Marion Parker
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
-- John Muir
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
-- D. H. Lawrence
Always look at the man who's involved in the tug-of-war with you. Don't just pull the rope; look up and see his eyes. You'll know then that he is a man, just like you. No matter what [...] he's shaking in his boots, just like you. A look like that renders the opponent helpless, if onl for a moment -- strike then.
-- Carlos Castaneda, The Active State of Infinity (don Juan to Carlos)
To learn the secret of right relations, look only for the divine in people and things, and leave all the rest to God.
-- J. Allen Boone, Kinship with All Life, 1976
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
-- Katherine Mansfield
Generosity is not in giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is in giving me that which you need more than I do.
-- Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.
-- T.H. White, The Once and Future King (Merlyn to Arthur)
The concern for man and his destiny must always be the chief interest of all technical effort. Never forget it between your diagrams and equations.
-- Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
-- Albert Einstein
It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy.
-- Dr. Howard Murphy
To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action.
-- Michael Hanson
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
-- Henry David Thoreau
There are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred. Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of mourning which had already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be anxious any more - you've already lost him/her."
-- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
-- George Moore
No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.
-- Albert Einstein
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1859
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
-- Henry David Thoreau
They didn't make conversation; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange fruit their conversation bore, for they didn't direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many people do.
-- John Steinbeck, Junius Maltby
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-- Franklin P. Adams
The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said.
-- Vaclav Havel
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
-- Edwin Schlossberg, "For My Father"
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
-- Marcel Proust, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896)
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
...see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...
-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.
-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you."
-- J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (Mr. Antolini to Holden)
It's good to laugh because you cannot laugh and have a conceptual thought simultaneously.
-- H. E. Garchen Rinpoche, 7 June 2003, George Eastman House
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
-- Benjamin Franklin, 11 September, 1783
A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires -- that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still -- can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires.
-- Bhagavad Gita 2.70
While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises.
From anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool.
-- Bhagavad Gita 2.62-63
Only the ignorant speak of devotional service as being different from the analytical study of the material world. Those who are actually learned say that he who applies himself well to one of these paths achieves the results of both.
-- Bhagavad Gita 5.4
Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me. I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Do not fear.
-- Bhagavad Gita 18.66
Si es capaz de ver lo bello, es porque trae la belleza dentro de si, ya que el mundo es un espejo y devuelve a cada hombre el reflejo de su propio rostro.
-- Paulo Coelho, Manual del Guerrero de la Luz
Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
-- Saint Augustine
Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing;
God never changeth.
-- Saint Teresa of Avila
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensible part of happiness.
-- Bertrand Russell
People create their own questions because they're afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it -- walk.
-- Ayn Rand
The architect of the future will build imitating Nature, for it is the most rational, long-lasting and economical of all methods.
-- Antoni Gaudi
The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature; the other books are taken from it, and in them there are the mistakes and misinterpretations of men.
-- Antoni Gaudi
God has made many doors opening into truth which He opens to all who knock upon them with hands of faith.
-- Khalil Gibran
Your food should be your only remedy.
-- Hippocrates
To eliminate disease, one must eliminate the use of fire in the preparation of food.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
Health is not all; but without health, all is nothing.
-- Schopenhauer
How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody?
How else can one change it?
He who understands and forgives -- where would he find a motive to act?
Where would he not?
-- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1940
O happy who thus liveth! Not caring much for gold;
With clothing which sufficeth to keep him from the cold.
Though poor and plan his diet, yet merry 'tis, and quiet.
-- Elizabethan Song Book, circa 1588
Every man shall eat in safety, under his own vine, what he plants; and sing the merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.
-- William Shakespear, Henry VIII
We should strengthen and beautify and industriously mould our bodies to be fit companions of the soul, assist them to grow up like trees, and be agreeable and wholesome objects in nature.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Journal, January 25, 1841
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence, clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
-- H.L. Mencken, 1920
He who digs a well, constructs a stone fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard, builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to his country long afterwards.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870
I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
-- Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1938
To have a great capital is not so necessary as to know how to manage a small one, and never to be without a little. It is not large funds that are wanted, but a constant supply, like a stream that never dies.
-- William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness, 1810
Language alone cannot convey the heart of the spiritual journey, so profound yet so ordinary that when one is living it, there is no inner movement toward words. Trying to describe it only takes one out of this experience, yet sitting in silence doesn't share it either.
-- Jacob Liberman, Wisdom from an Empty Mind
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you.
Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.
-- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam (1926)
You are blind and I am deaf and dumb, so let us touch hands and understand.
-- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam (1926)
They say to me in their awakening, "You and the world you live in are but a grain of sand upon the infinite shore of an infinite sea." And in my dream I say to them, "I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore."-- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam (1926)
My house says to me, "Do not leave me, for here dwells your past." And the road says to me, "Come and follow me, for I am your future." And I say to both my house and the road, "I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things."-- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam (1926)
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
-- Marshall McLuhan (1957)
When you cease to think of yourself as a slave, it will be impossible for anyone to enslave you.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
But this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to blieve in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world', to /causa prima/.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #9
The sage as astronomer. - As long as you still feel the stars as being something 'over you' you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #71
And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words - We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that won't even last a million years...
-- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
Resolute contemplation of the terrifying object is the only possible treatment.
-- Bertrand Russell
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstacy at your feet.
-- Franz Kafka
...one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.
With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
-- Albert Einstein, Inaugural address before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1914 (found in Ideas and Opinions)
As long as the possibility of war remains, nations will insist on being as perfectly prepared in a military sense as they can, in order to emerge triumphant from the next war. It will also be impossible to avoid educating the youth in warlike traditions and cultivating narrow national vanity joined to the glorification of the warlike spirit, as long as people have to be prepared for occasions when such a spirit will be needed for the purpose of war. To arm is to give one's voice and make one's preparations, not for peace but for war. Therefore people will not disarm step by step; they will disarm at one blow or not at all.
[...]
We stand, therefore, at the parting of the ways. Whether we find the way of peace or continue along the old road of brute force, so unworthy of our civilization, depends on ourselves. On the one side the freedom of the individual and the security of society beckon to us; on the other, slavery for the individual and the annihilation of our civilization threaten us. Our fate will be according to our deserts.
-- Albert Einstein, The Question of Disarmament, Mein Weltbild, 1934 (found in Ideas and Opinions)
Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and the selectivity connected with it has by many people been cited as authorization of the encouragement of the spirit of competition. Some people also in such a way have tried to prove pseudoscientifically the necessity of the destructive economic struggle of competition between individuals. But this is wrong, because man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a socially living animal. As little as a battle between single ants of an ant hill is essential for survival, just so little is this the case with the individual members of a human community.
-- Albert Einstein, On Education address in Albany, NY, Oct. 15, 1936 (found in Ideas and Opinions)
It is the nature of bureaucrats to object to all change except increase in their own power.
-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
The world is full of idle people, mostly women, who have little education, much money, and consequently great self-confidence. Owing to their wealth, they are able to cause much labour to be devoted to their comfort. Although they seldom have any genuine culture, they are the chief patrons of art, which is not likely to please them unless it is bad. Their uselessness drives them into an unreal sentimentality, which causes them to dislike vigorous sincerity, and to exercise a deplorable influence upon culture. Especially in America, where the men who make money are mostly too busy to spend it themselves, culture is largely dominated by women whose sole claim to respect is that their husbands possess the art of growing rich. There are those who maintain that capitalism is more favourable to art than Socialism would be, but I think they are remembering the aristocracies of the past and forgetting the plutocracies of the present.
The existence of the idle rich has other unfortunate results. Although, in the more important industries, the modern tendency is towards few large enterprises than many small ones, there are still many exceptions to this rule. Consider, for example, the number of unnecessary small shops in London. Throughout the parts where rich women do their shopping, there are innumerable hat shops, usually kept by Russian countesses, each professing to be a little more exquisite than any of the others. Their customers drift from one to the next, spending hours on a purchase which ought to be a matter of minutes. The labour of those who serve in the shops and the time of those who buy in them is alike wasted. And there is the further evil that the livelihood of a number of people becomes bound up with futility. The spending power of the very rich causes them to have large numbers of parasites who, however far removed from wealth they may be themselves, nevertheless fear that they would be ruined if there were no idle rich to buy their wars. All these people suffer morally, intellectually, andartistically from their dependence on the indefensible power of foolish people.
-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
During the last hundred and fifty years, it is true, there has been a brief interval of liberalism, but now the white races are reverting to the theological bigotry which the Christians took over from the Jews. The Jews first invented the notion that only one religion could be true, but they had no wish to convert all the world to it, and therefore only persecuted other Jews. The Christians, retaining the Judaic belief in a special revelation, added to it the Roman desire for worldwide dominion and the Greek taste for metaphysical subtleties. The combination produced the most fiercely persecuting religion the world has yet known. In Japan and China, Buddhism was peaceably accepted and allowed to exist along with Shinto and Confucianism; in the Mohammedan world, Christians and Jews were not molested so long as they paid the tribute; but throughout Christendom death was the usual penalty for even the smallest deviation from orthodoxy.
-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
All my life needed was a sense of some place to go. I don't believe that someone should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people.
-- Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver (Paul Schrader)
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from on eperson to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
-- Albert Einstein, Religion and Science (New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930)
With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no /self-respect/, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. ... Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy /is/ worse than the evil. /It/ makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and /do/ better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
-- Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. Iplease myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.
-- Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
He who would travel happily must travel light.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
-- Herman Hesse
The guardian of the lake was a lonely man, the more so because he had a wife. He showed me her picture in a plastic shield in his wallet, a prettyish blonde girl trying her best to live up to the pictures in the magazines, a girl of products, home permanents, shampoos, rinses, skin conditioners. She hated being out in what she called the Sticks, longed for the great and graious life in Toledo or South Bend. Her only company was found in the shiny pages of Charm and Glamour. Eventually she would sulk her way to success. Her husband would get a job in some great clanging organism of progress, and they would live happily ever after. All this came through in small, oblique spurts in his conversation. She knew exactly what she wanted and he didn't, but his want would ache in him all his life. After he drove away in his jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me. He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn't have both.
-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
Life's not a bitch
Life is a beautiful woman
You only call her a bitch because she wouldn't let you get that pussy
Maybe she didn't feel y'all an'she had any similar interests
Or maybe you just an asshole that couldn't sweet-talk the princess
-- Aesop Rock, "Daylight"
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
Anything that grows is always more beautiful to look at than anything which is built.
-- Lin Yu Tang
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
You'll never know the hurt I've suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry
-- Bob Dylan, "Idiot Wind"
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
-- Dom Helda Camara
Sickness, whether mental or physical, seems to be one of several ways in which people express self-protest against a way of life that will not support wellness. People become ill, not just because of germs, viruses, trauma, or stress, but because these assaults fall upon receptive hosts. People become sick because they live sickening ways of life! The healthier people, when they find their present ways of life dull, frustrating, or tedious, pay attention to their "all is not well" signals and change what they are doing, including their ways of behaving with others.
-- Sidney Jourard
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-- Marcel Proust
The soul is filled throughout with discord and dissonance, and so its first need is poetic madness. That way through musical sounds we can waken what is dormant, through sweet harmonies calm what is turbulent, and through the blending of various elements quell the discord and temper the different parts of the soul.
-- Marsilio Ficino
Play and Pray.
Pray and Play.
-- Miles Davis
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Do not take up music, unless you would rather die than not do so.
-- Nadia Boulanger
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
-- Robert Fripp
Music is only love looking for words.
-- Lawrence Durrell
Without music, life would be a mistake.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
-- Louis Armstrong
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-- William Shakespeare
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardners who make our souls blossom.
-- Marcel Proust
I am reading about some persons, long dead. Surreptitiously, other names insert themselves into the text, and, presently, I am reading about us, as we shall be when we are the past. Most has utterly vanished. Problems which were once so vital, spread themselves over the pages as cold abstractions--simple ones, but we failed to understand them. We appear as rather stupid, foolish, self-seeking puppets, moved by obvious strings, which, now and again, get tangled up.
-- Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
There are seven sins in the world:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice and
Politics without principle.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
Once the game is over,
the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
-- Italian Proverb
He not busy being born is busy dying.
-- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave.
-- William Pitt
We never say of a blues singer that he sounds sad. Of course he sounds sad. If the song is authentically an expression of the person's suffering, then the suffering is transcended and you don't get the whine, you don't get the complaint, even though it may be all about a whine and a complaint. It's experienced as relief, as comfort, as pleasure.
-- Leonard Cohen
Mental toughness is spartanism with the qualities of sacrifice, self-denial and dedication. It is fearless, and it is love.
-- Vince Lombardi
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
-- Henry Miller
Some lady professor there asked at one point if we weren't scared of the drug scene, then weren't we at least feeling guilty about using junk. I think now and that pisses me off. Like just what is guilty or who is guilty for fuck sake? Big business dudes make billions come out of their ass and they ain't shelling out a reefer's worth of tax. Kids walk through some jungle I don't know how far away and shoot people, and white haired old men in smoking jacket armchairs make laws to keep it all going smoothly. I swim in the river and have to duck huge amounts of shit and grease and "newly discovered miracle fibers" every five feet I move because those smokestack companies don't give a flying fuck... Shit my man, it's so all there that no one's seeing it anymore. And it's dumbass of me to bring it up even now because it's all so much bull-pap corn and I cut out of that a long time ago, so maybe that's why I don't feel too guilty right now... come back later, prof.
You just got to see that junk is just another nine to five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows.
-- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
I suggest a simple experiment. Everytime you hear the expression "the war on drugs," change it mentally to "the war on some drugs." At the same time call up to mind all the Drug Stores and Bars/Saloons in your town or neighborhood and all the cigarette shelves in your friendly supermaket and remember that the government has started no war against them. When you understand that we have no "war on drugs" but only a "war on some drugs," consult the passages on double-think and duck-speak in Orwell's "1984" for further enlightenment on neurolinguistic mindwarping.
-- Ralph Anton Wilson
LSD - a compound that causes occasional psychotic behaviour in those that don't take it.
-- Timothy Leary
Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
-- Robin Williams
I don't like people who take drugs... Customs men for example.
-- Mick Miller
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
-- Harry S. Truman
We must discover new frontiers... People have been standing for centuries before a worm-eaten door, making pinholes in it with increasing ease. The time has come to kick it down, for it is only on the other side that everything begins.
-- Raoul Vaneigem
Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.
-- Lebanese proverb
The East Coast is an intelligence test - if you leave, you pass.
-- Timothy Leary
I'm not making fun of white people picking up on black things: all I'm saying is that black people should get paid when this shit goes mainstream.
-- Chuck D
The Gun Lobby says we need guns to protect ourselves from the present government. Heiligefliegendekindersheisse! -- Have they looked at the government lately? To protect ourselves against the current government we each need 1700 tactical nuclear weapons, at least 100 earth-to-air missiles, 50,000 flame throwers, 10,000 grenade launchers and at least a hundred times as many assault weapons as NRA now owns, plus biologcal and chemical (viral) weaponry. Maybe instead of going to war with Washington, when they have us totally outgunned, we should try reasoning and negotiating with them?
-- Ralph Anton Wilson
Racism designates the ignorant, bigoted, politically incorrect dogma that O.J. must be guilty because he is black. Feminism designates the enlightened, educated, politically correct dogma that O.J. must be guilty because he is male.
-- Ralph Anton Wilson
I regard a "cult" as a religion small enough to be easily victimized by the authorities and a religion as a cult big enough to force the authorities to treat it with respect. And that is the only difference I can see.
-- Ralph Anton Wilson
I like taking the "dig the patterns in this leaf" approach instead of the L-system fractal approach.
-- Dave Kaminski
If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that juror has accepted the exercize of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and a right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Bancroft, History of the Constitution
If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence.
-- 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969
When a jury acquits a defendent even though he or she clearly appears to be guilty, the acquittal conveys significant information about community attitudes and provides a guideline for future prosecutorial discretion...Because of the high acquittal rate in prohibition cases in the 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition laws could not be enforced. The repeal of these laws is traceable to the refusal of juries to convict those accused of alcohol traffic.
-- Sheflin and Van Dyke, Law and Contemorary Problems, 43, No. 4, 1980
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
-- Golda Meir
Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins....I can never see anything exactly from the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make some progress towards it. I can eliminate at least the grosser illusions of perspective....If I can't get out of the dungeon I shall at least look out through the bars. It is better than sinking back on the straw in the darkest corner.
-- C.S. Lewis
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards.
-- Abraham Lincoln
That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant...To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
-- John Stuart Mill
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
-- Douglas Adams
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
-- Thomas Hobbes
A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.
-- John Locke
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
-- Henry David Thoreau
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.
-- Noam Chomsky
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media.
-- Noam Chomsky
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments.
-- Noam Chomsky
The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all.
-- Noam Chomsky
People who believe in a better way of life know that the way we live now is criminal. Denial of freedoms, death by starvation and exploitation, denigration of peoples capabilities everywhere. If you see that these outcomes are socially produced, then you understand that every person who dies as a result was effectively murdered. Once you accept the possibility of attaining a humanist alternative, you have to be a terrible hypocrite, coward or cynic to live passively with the contrast between what is and what could be.
-- Albert, Chomsky, et al, Liberating Theory
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
-- Noam Chomsky
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Health is the first muse and sleep is the condition to produce it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
-- Aldous Huxley
I read this interview with Robert Frost where he said he never wrote a poem to pay the electric light bill. I thought he was saying a lot. What I'm saying is that the western world doesn't realize that commercial and creativity doesn't mean limitations. The point I'm trying to make is that we in the western world could enjoy success spiritually, creatively, racially, financially, on every level if one thing could be understood: All a person wants to do with his life is to feel comfortable that he is making a contribution to his fellow man, whether it is emotionally or intellectually, we all want to feel we are making a contribution.
-- Ornette Coleman
By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates
We put people on the moon and it's not even safe for a woman to walk on the street after dark.
-- Ben Harper
It's like your surfing: the wave is stronger than you. If you relax and have no fear, and you're with the flow of the wave, you can ride it. But if you try to fight it, you'll wipe out. The same wave that can be a source of pain, or a beautiful flowing grace - its all a matter of how you respond to it.
-- Trey Anastasio, Oct. 26 1995
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
-- Frank Zappa
I will not succumb to evil, unless she's cute.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
-- William Butler Yeats, "A Drinking Song"
Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
-- Henrik Tikkanen
They that can give up essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin
In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way that society works.
-- Barrington Moore
We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we're looking for.
-- Tyler Durden (in "Fight Club")
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
-- Wynn Catlin
If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance.
-- John Andrew Holmes
If there is something you're thinking of doing, or wish you could do, begin it. In boldness there is mystery and power.
-- Goethe
If you will it, it is no dream.
-- Theodor Herzl
Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.
-- Robert F. Bennett
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
-- Albert Einstein
A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians, and sober, decent folk... As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers and frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some--and who knows how many?--waste away with quiet obstinacy and finally go under.
-- Herman Hesse, "Under the Wheel"
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein
If you scratch a cynic, underneath you'll find a disappointed idealist.
-- George Carlin
You can't write a chord that's ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
-- Frank Zappa
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
-- Albert Schweitzer
"Now, man, that alto man last night had IT--he held it oonce he found it; I've never seen a guy who could hold so long." I wanted to know what "IT" meant. "Ah well"--Dean laughed--"now you're asking me inpon-de-rables--ahem! Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it--everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT--"
-- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
It is art that makes life... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
-- Henry James
The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.
-- Auguste Rodin
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
-- H.S. Thompson
I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know.
-- Nero Wolfe
Stop watching so much damn TV and read a fucking book!
-- Trey Anastasio
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
-- Elizabeth Kbler-Ross
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
-- Publilius Syrus
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees, and flowers, and clouds, and stars.
-- Martin Luther
Perfect love is rare indeed - for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.
-- Leo Buscaglia
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.
-- Khalil Gibran
You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
-- Don Herold
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
-- Khalil Gibran
One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time.
-- Charlie Brown (Charles Schultz)
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive?
Love is everything it's cracked up to be.
That's why people are so cynical about it.
It really is worth fighting for,
Being brave for,
Risking everything for.
And the trouble is,
If you don't risk anything,
You risk even more.
-- Erica Jong
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To hope is to risk pain.
To try is to risk failure,
But risk must be taken,
Because the greatest hazard in life
Is to risk nothing
-- Leo Buscaglia
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
-- Frederick Buechner
Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
-- Robert F. Kennedy
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
-- Robert F. Kennedy
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
-- Dalai Lama
Since the days of Greece and Rome when the word 'citizen' was a title of honor, we have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities. And today, as never before in the free world, responsibility is the greatest right of citizenship and service is the greatest of freedom's privileges.
-- Robert F. Kennedy
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein
The war creates no absolutely new situation. It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.
-- C.S. Lewis
You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery
There's a macho attitude among some computer jocks (although certainly not among the best of them) that the harder something is to deal with, the more advanced it is. Actually, of course, it's very hard to make things easy. The more work you put into something, the less work the person who uses it has to do.
-- Arthur Naiman
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
-- Oscar Wilde
I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.
-- Samuel Beckett
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
-- Khalil Gibran
To a worm in a horseradish, the whole world is a horseradish.
-- Yiddish proverb
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
-- Albert Einstein
There is nothing at all absurd about the human condition. We matter. It seems to me a good guess, hazarded by a good many people who have thought about it, that we may be engaged in the formation of something like a mind for the life of this planet. If this is so, we are still at the most primitive stage, still fumbling with language and thinking, but infinitely capacitated for the future. Looked at this way, it is remarkable that we've come as far as we have in so short a period, really no time at all as geologists measure time. We are the newest, the youngest, and the brightest thing around.
-- Dr. Lewis Thomas
To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work - for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Prosrustes - deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness.
-- Carl Jung
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber stamps.
-- Henry Louis Mencken
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
-- W.H. Auden
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It is only necessary to be rich.
-- Alan Alda
He who slings mud, usually loses ground.
-- Adlai Stevenson
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in a square hole, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, and are the ones who'll do it.
-- Apple Computer TV Ad
Women's styles may change but their designs remain the same.
-- Oscar Wilde
It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.
-- Albert Einstein
If you want to kiss the sky you'd better learn how to kneel.
-- U2
Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-- Gore Vidal
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-- Albert Einstein
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain
During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
-- Henry Adams
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
-- Mark Twain
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Jesus promises you two things: your life has meaning and you're going to live forever. If you get a better offer, take it.
-- Rev. Eugene Walsh
Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
-- Richard M. Nixon
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the Glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Neslon Mandela
If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that ... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.
-- John Lennon
If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
-- Thomas A. Edison
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
-- William Blake
If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real.
-- Newt Gingrich
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
-- Matt Groening
When a Prince's personal conduct is correct, his government is effective without his issuing of orders; if his personal conduct is not correct, he may issue orders but they will not be followed.
-- Confucius
If we really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein
Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
-- Richard Foster
Closed mouths gather no feet.
Ignorance, like a false tooth, is easier to detect when the mouth is open.
You've got to dance like nobody's watching, and love like it's never going to hurt.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
-- W.C. Fields
If at first you do not succeed, so much for sky-diving.
Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away. As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! ...Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to heighten and enhance the reality of everyday.
-- Henry Miller
Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
-- James Allen
The reason two antelope walk together is so that one can blow the dust out of the eyes of the other.
-- African Proverb
Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.
We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde
I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid doing altogether.
Man it's cold in Cleveland in the winter. What ever happened with this global warming thing? I don't feel it. Every day in the winter I'm outside with my aerosol can, spraying. Fuck the grandchildren! I'm cold now!
-- Drew Carey
Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will make gods by the dozens.
-- Montaigne
Everyone has a right to be stupid. Some just abuse the privilege.
Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.
-- Orson Scott Card
That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues makes them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
-- Ernest Hemmingway, A Farewell to Arms
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Education is that which allows you to get into more intelligent trouble.
O brave new world that has such people in it.
-- Shakespeare
I did not feel smooth. I started to feel bad but never considered slowing down. I was not concerned with what my opponent was going to do, I just concentrated on staying with him. I kept telling myself, there's no way I am going to lose this race.
-- Alberto Salazar
It looked easy to others, but I was suffering. I had a cramp with six miles to go. I just kept saying to myself, forget about my time and just win. It has to do with your will and how much pain you are willing to put into your running.
-- Grete Waitz
A lot of people run a race to see who is the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts. It is about who is willing to run an exhausting pace and at the end punish themselves even more.
-- Steve Prefontaine
We can all remember teachers, coaches and spectators saying that 'they must enjoy their sport.' I don't believe those people understand what it is to voluntarily subject the body to a series of hard repetitions in training without recovery, or to maintain a blistering pace during a 3000, 5000, or 10,000 meters or a cross-country race, regardless of the weather or terrain. To enjoy training is not really the appropriate phrase; to gain satisfaction or fulfillment from training is more appropriate.
-- Joe Vigil
The idiot forgives and forgets,
The bastard neither forgives and nor forgets,
The wise man forgives, but he does not EVER forget.
We never become truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.
-- Phillips Brooks
A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
-- Donna Roberts
A friend is always good to have, but a lover's kiss is like angels raining down on me.
-- Dave Matthews
When you're tired of what you got, try me.
-- James Brown
Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.
-- Fredrich Halm
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.
-- Phyllis McGinley
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
-- Sophocles
We can do not great things - only small things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
-- Oscar Wilde
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
-- Jean Anouilh
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
-- Elbert Hubbard
You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.
-- Amy Carmichael
When your heart speaks, take good notes.
-- Judith Campbell
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
-- Matt Groening
Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love.
-- Robert Heinlein
Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery
The real test of friendship is: Can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy together those moments of life that are utterly simple? They are the moments people looks back on at the end of life and number as their most sacred experiences.
-- Eugene Kennedy
The closer I'm bound in love to you, the closer I am to free.
-- Indigo Girls
More than kisses, letters mingle souls.
-- John Donne
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.
-- Franois de La Rouchefoucauld
Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
-- John Wesley
I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
-- Mother Teresa
The course of true love never did run smooth.
-- William Shakespeare
It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
-- Khalil Gibran
To love another person is to help them love God.
-- Sren Kierkegaard
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
-- Rose Franken
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
-- Victor Hugo
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, re-made all the time, made new.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin
Who, being loved, is poor?
-- Oscar Wilde
What is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.
-- Victor Hugo
A friend is someone who reaches for your hand, but touches your heart.
-- The Little Prince
What makes life worth living? To be born with the gift of laughter and sense that the world is mad.
-- Searamouche
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
-- Matthew Arnold
Each friend represents a new world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meaning that a new world is born.
-- Anais Nin
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-- Albert Einstein
You see things that are and say, "Why?" but I dream things that never were, and say, "Why not?"
-- George Bernard Shaw
You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you won or lost, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life, you'll find - you're never sorry you were kind.
-- Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert V. Prochnow, Jr.
You should avoid the temptation of thinking that your dreams can be realized only in some far-off place. If you think that way, you'll neglect the possibilities in your immediate surroundings.
-- Miyamoto Musashi
I am afraid to tell you who I am, because, if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it's all I have.
-- John Polies
How true it is that what we really see day by day depends less on the objects and scenes before our eyes than on the eyes themselves AND the minds and hearts that use them.
-- F.D. Huntington
Your talent is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.
-- Leo Buscaglia
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
-- Agnes Repplier
When you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
-- Joseph Campbell
I have learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
-- Leo Rosten
When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.
-- Barbara J. Winter
There are two ways of spreading light -- to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-- Edith Wharton
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
-- Schweitzer, Albert
Each small task of every day is part of the total harmony of the universe.
-- St. Theresa of Lisieux
The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold; the feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.
-- Democritus
Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
-- Charles Dickens
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.
-- Ernest Hemingway