Love and Charity

Love and charity share the same root word. How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggests that they cannot coexist, that they are antithetical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?
--Nick Hornby

Participation

True religion is in participation, not in dogma. Dogma is par excellence a human creation. The idea that the performance or non-performance of a particular rite will save or damn your soul is ridiculous, but is commonly accepted by people everywhere. The root--the ground of the experience--is what we desire.
--Loren Williams

Familiar Doctrine

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
--H. L. Mencken

Research

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
--Thorstein Veblen

Good Points

It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.
--Francoise Sagan

The Act of Dying

The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments.
--John Stuart Mill

Sanity

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
--David Foster Wallace

Poetry Prose

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
--Mario M. Cuomo

Advertising

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
--Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Courage

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
--Henri Matisse

Preschool

Goldman Sachs has 14 business principles, many of which could apply to a preschool. ("We stress creativity and imagination.")
--Daniel Gross

They Will End

This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good--really, really, consistently good--I have become aware that they will end.
--Judith Warner

Enlightenment

From the dawn of human consciousness, when people became aware that they were going to die and didn't like the idea, there have always been "gurus," and priests and preachers, shamans, wizards, oracles, spiritual "advisors," and self-help "experts," who've seen the quest for enlightenment and the search for heaven as a opportunity to make a fast buck.
--Lance Mannion

Rational

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.
--Amy Wallace

Realism

I've always thought sports teach realism: What you can do, what you can't, how to win, how to lose, how to deal with it.
--Gene Lyons

Evil

Bailing out corporations with billions (who then give their executives lavish bonuses) while we cannot help those in desperate need and misery--this is the epitome of evil.
--Andy Vortex

Individual

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
--Ambrose Bierce

Since the Days

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Surely Tested

Man's mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality. This can be easily and surely tested by going to church. When anything serious is being said, the congregation dozes or squirms. But if the ranter--I mean the reverend--begins some old wives' tale, everyone wakes up and strains to hear.
--Desiderus Erasmus (The Praise of Folly, circa 1668)

Reasons

The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.
--Jean Renoir

Truth

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.
--Lillian Hellman

Fragile and Forgettable

That is what fall means...It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree.
--Garrison Keillor

Hawaii

You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii.
--Michelle Obama

Pick Battles

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
--Jonathan Kozol

Unique Gift

That is the unique gift that humans have above all animals: they can share their death with each other.
--William Barrett

Doubts

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.
--Bruce Springsteen

Holding

There is no greater agony than holding an untold story inside of you.
--Maya Angelou

New Media

This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country.
--Garrison Keillor

Continuous Creation

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
--Norman O. Brown

Truly Were Ever

More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.
--Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald

Live For

Horses live to run; that's what they do. What do we live to do, the way horses live to run?... This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.
--Martha Beck