ADVERSITY
"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."
-Horace
CHANGE
"People don't change, Val. Not their fundamental character. Whatever you're going to be as an adult is already visible to someone who really knows you from your birth onward."
-Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile, pg60
“All the world's a stage, and the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
--William Shakespeare
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."
-Kurt Vonnegut (and someone else?)
"There is no intelligence where there is no change."
-H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1896)
CHARACTER
Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted. -Anonymous
CHILDREN/CHILDHOOD
"If only we could bring back the full days we knew as kids. But we became too familiar with the data of experience, I suggest. Our way of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt sytle - this is, in increasingly abstract forms - speeds up experiences into a dangerous topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy. Our need for rapid disposal eliminates the details that bewitch, hold, or delay the children. Are is one rescue from this chaotic acceleration. Meter in poetry, tempo in music, form and color in painting. But we do feel that we are speeding earthward, crashing into our graves."-Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, pg192
"You can never go back to your childhood."
-Graham Greene, The Human Factor, pg77
"Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will."
-E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, pg69
DEATH
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg182
DREAMING
“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wondering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.”
--Arthur O'Shaughnessy
“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul.
Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”
--Ralph Vaull Starr
“If you spend all your time dreaming of who you want to be,
Then you are wasting who you are.”
--Anonymous
EVIL
"I'd be glad of a retaliation that wouldn't recoil on myself; but treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends: they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies." -Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, pg111
FREEDOM
"Man is free the moment he wants to be."
-Voltaire, Brutus, act II, scene I (1730)
FRIENDSHIP
"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, Nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship;
It is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one,
When they discover that someone else believes in them
And is willing to trust them."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What a gamble friendship is!"
-E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, pg41
"Friendship is one of the most satisfying things in the world."
-E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, pg115
GOVERNMENT
"Every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme. It accepts enormous loans that can never be repaid."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird, pg51
GROWTH
"If you just think about your own viewpoint and you have no willingness to open yourself to opposing viewpoints, there will be no room for growth or improvement." -His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work, pg73
HABIT
"Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. The man who has formed a habit of women or gin, of opium-smoking or glagellation, finds it as difficult to live without his vice as to live without bread and water, even though the actual practice of the vice may have become in itself as unexciting as eating a crust or drinking a glass from the kitchen tap."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg221
"Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths."
–Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg297
HAPPINESS
"Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone."
-Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, pg161
" 'That's the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,' Mrs Quarles went on; 'they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That's the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it's inevitably a disappointment - for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it's been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy. It's because they're on the wrong road."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg352-353
"Being happy doesn't mean everything is perfect, It just means you choose to look beyond the imperfections"
-unknown
HUMOUR
" I can only please one person per day.
Today isn't your day.
Tomorrow doesn't look good either."
Today isn't your day.
Tomorrow doesn't look good either."
--Anonymous
IMAGINATION
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
- Albert Einstein
LIFE & LIVING
" 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.' "
–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg183
"We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I'll get hold if it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning."
–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg187
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”
-Douglas Everett
"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
"You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.
[cont] Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about."
-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, pg153
" 'When humanity's destroyed, obviously they'll be no more problem. But it seems a poor sort of solution. I believe there may be another, even within the framework of the present system. A temporary one while the system's being modified in the direction of a permanent solution. The root of the evil's in the individual psychology; so it's there, in the individual psychology, that you'd have to begin. The first step would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments. In come compartment as industrialized workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human beings for the rest.'
[cont]'Don't they do that already?'
[cont]'Of course they don't. They live as idiots and machines all the time, at work and in their leisure. Like idiots and machines, but imagining they're living like civilized humans, even like gods. The first thing to do is to make them admit that they are idiots and machines during working hours. 'Our civilization being what it is, this is what you'll have to say to them, 'you've got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. but there you are. You've got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll all starve. Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be. Don't mix the two lives together; keep the bulkheads watertight between them. The genuine human life in your leisure hours in the real thing. The other's just a dirty job that's got to be done. And never forget that it is dirty and, except in so far as it keeps you fed and society intact, utterly unimportant, utterly irrelevant to the real human life. Don't be deceived by the canting rogues who talk of the sanctity of labour and the Christian Service that business men do their fellows. It's all lies. Work's just a nasty, dirty job, made unfortunately necessary by the folly of your ancestors. They piled up a mountain of garbage and you've got to go on digging it away, for fear it might stink you to death, dig for dear life, while cursing the memory of the maniacs who made all the dirty work for you to do. but don't try to cheer yourself up by pretending the nasty mechanical job is a noble one. It isn't; and the only result of saying and believing that it is, will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work. If you believe in business as Service and the sanctity of labour, you'll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Admit it's dirty, hold your nose and do it for eight hours and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure. A real complete human being . Not a newspaper reader, not a jazzer, not a radio fan. The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don't let them. Make the effort of being human.' That's what you've got to say to people; that's the lesson you've got to teach the young. You've got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it. It'll be a very long time before decent living and industrialized smell can be reconciled. Perhaps, indeed, they're irreconcilable. It remains to be seen. In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.' "
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg304-306
"It's humiliating, it's horribly humiliating that human beings should have made such a devilish mess of things. Life could have been so beautiful, if they'd cared to make it so. Yes, and it was beautiful once, I believe. Now it's just an insanity; it's just death violently galvanized, twitching about and making a hellish hullabaloo to persuade itself that it isn't really death, but the most exuberant sort of life. "
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg320
"They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted - that there's an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of the modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive, and emotional part of man doesn't contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable. The low-brow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg322-323
“We want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch5
“Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and its life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch6
“Of course life is valueless, except to itself. And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now—to myself. It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot help, for it is the life that is in me that makes the rating.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch7
“And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
[cont] “I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch24
"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."
-Vladamir Nabokov
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
--Plato
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."
- Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was.
I would only open my eyes a little bit more."
- Jules Renard
I would only open my eyes a little bit more."
- Jules Renard
“Some reckon their age by years,
Some measure their life by art;
But some tell their days by the flow of their tears
And their lives by the moans of their hearts.”
--Abram Joseph Ryan
“Look at everything
As though you were seeing it
Either for the first time or the last time.
Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
-- Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life.
A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
-Mark Twain
"We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird, pg236
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
–Virginia Woolf
" You've got to sing like nobody's listening,
You've got to love like you'll never get hurt,
You've got to dance like nobody's watching,
You've got to live like it's Heaven on Earth."
--Anonymous
You've got to love like you'll never get hurt,
You've got to dance like nobody's watching,
You've got to live like it's Heaven on Earth."
--Anonymous
“As for man, his days are as grass: as a
flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
and the place there of shall know it no more.”
--Psalms ciii: 15-16
LOVE
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
-Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliiff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
-Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, pg51
"A smart boy isn't looking for a girl who is even smarter, he's looking for a girl who will love him."
-Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile, pg91
"And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, pg8
"When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, pg11
"For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, pg11-12
"But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, pg12-13
"And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, pg13
"Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others."
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, pg234
“Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream,
And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.”
-George Linley "Thou Art Gone"“The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual bond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the flesh had little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’s hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips.”
[cont] “it is better and finer to love than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth while that one is not loath to die for it. I forget my own life in the love of another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live as right now when I place the least value upon my own life.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch27
MARRIAGE
“1st rule of marriage: If you're right, apologize fast.”
--Anonymous
MISTAKES
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
--Albert Einstein
" 'You've got the wrong sort of pride,' she had told him. 'You're not ashamed of being a dunce and not knowing things. But you are ashamed of making mistakes. You'd rather not do a thing at all than do it badly. That's quite wrong.' "
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg311
MONEY
"Those who never lose sight of the purpose of money and have the ability to relate to money with a healthy perspective, even though such people may actually possess less money, will enjoy a greater sense of well-being with regard to wealth and money. So, ironically, they may be poorer in terms of actual material wealth but they are in reality richer, for they are able to understand the true worth of money, and are freed from the unrealistic expectations about what wealth will provide."
-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work, pg61
MUSIC
" Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
-- Berthold Auerbach
-- Berthold Auerbach
OPPORTUNITY
“No man makes opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it came to them.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch10
READING/LITERATURE
"Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones raper her and leave her for the flies."-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg111
"In the old days there was still a considerable literary community in our country, and medicine and law were still 'the learned professions,' but in an American city today you can no longer count on doctors, lawyers, businessmen, journalists, politicians, television personalities, architects, or commodities traders to discuss Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems."
-Saul Bellow (Ravelstein)
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again. This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."
-William Faulkner
"...books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared."
-John Irving, The Fourth Hand, pg322
REGRET
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
–Mark Twain
SEX
“Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't either. “
--Anonymous
SPIRIT
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
-Albert Einstein
SUCCESS
"Falling doesn't make you a failure,
staying down does."
-- From 'God's Little Instruction Book'
staying down does."
-- From 'God's Little Instruction Book'
TIME
“The ultimate justice. The only law. The best healer. The most fearsome weapon. The friend that is always there. The enemy who fells all who stand. Time is the fire in which we burn. Time is the only element.”
--Anonymous
TRAVEL
“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”
– Paul Fussell
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
–Henry Miller
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu
TRUTH
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
--Flannery O'Connor
--Flannery O'Connor
WISDOM/INTELLIGENCE
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"During periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity,
the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden
clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight."
-Fritj of Capra
"People are not as smart as bugs."
-E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, pg67
“He who asks is a fool for 5 minutes, but he who does not remains a fool forever.”
--Chinese Proverb
"A wise man learns something new every day..
The fool knows it all already."
The fool knows it all already."
--Anonymous
WOMEN
“Never argue with a women when she's tired -- or rested.
--Anonymous
WORK
"I think it is important to remember that in all human activities, whether it is work or some other activity, the main purpose should be to benefit human beings."
-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work, pg37
"And in the modern world particularly, and in industrialized nations where many people do have opportunities to choose the kind of job they take, I think it is best to choose work that does not cause harm to others, that does not exploit or deceive others, either directly or indirectly. I think that's the best way."
-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work, pg171
"Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying."
-Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, pg149
"Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig."
-Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, pg150
UNCLASSIFIED
"There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg189
"To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg190
"You shouldn't confuse contentment with complacency."
-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work, pg28
“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
--Albert Einstein
“Every man I meet is in some way my superior.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
“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 reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One can tip too much as well as too little; indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has not yet been minted."
-E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, pg10
“I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged up on others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.”
--Benjamin Franklin
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
--Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
--Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, pg172-173
"The only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth. And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg402
The Ordinary Man:
"He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he's got feet. It's when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They're ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg405
"It's a damned sight better to behave like a beast - a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean - than to invent a devil and then behave like one's invention."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg405
"Nobody's asking you to be anything but a man. A man, mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man's a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that's unconscious and earthly and mysterious on the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually. But so is all real, genuine, living truth - just nonsense according to logic. And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth. You can choose which you like, logic or life. It's a matter of taste. Some people prefer being dead."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg406
"Leave the instincts to themselves and they'll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession - why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg407
"The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of a arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God."
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, pg426
“It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”
--Thomas Jefferson
“The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the other.”
-Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Ch6
“The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.”
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "The Day Is Done"
Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.
-Martin Luther (1483-1546) German priest and scholar
"The search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them."
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg247
“Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.”
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
"When we walk to the edge of all the light we have;
And take the step into the darkness of the unknown;
We must believe that one of two things will happen...
There will be something solid for us to stand on..
..... or we will be taught to fly."
-- Patrick Overton
And take the step into the darkness of the unknown;
We must believe that one of two things will happen...
There will be something solid for us to stand on..
..... or we will be taught to fly."
-- Patrick Overton
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in."
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
"Though it's important that people know you,
It is more important if they think you are worth knowing."
It is more important if they think you are worth knowing."
--Anonymous
