The Right Moment

Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

--Jean de la Bruyere

Confused

The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented--and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

--Al Gore (Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech)

Butterfly, Quietly

Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

Who Doubts

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

--Rollo May

Animal Spirits

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits--a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

--John Maynard Keynes

Clarity, Obscurity

Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

As You Are

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?

--Fanny Brice

Fragile Blue Crescent

Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

--Carl Sagan

Secrecy Is The Mark

I have taught the way without making any distinction between inner and outer teaching. For in respect of the truth there must be no such thing as the "closed fist" of the teacher, who hides some essential knowledge from the pupil. Secrecy is the mark of false doctrine.

--Digha Nikaya

Once Upon A Time

"Thou shall not" might reach the head, but it takes "Once upon a time" to reach the heart.

--Philip Pullman

Sum Total

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Live Among Savages

All the property that is necessary to a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of. But all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. He can have no right to the benefits of society, who will not pay his club towards the support of it.

--Benjamin Franklin

Sequestered

He thought, How we're each sequestered in our own suffering.

--Ha Jin

The More, The Less

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

--Richard Bach

Unreasonable

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

--George Bernard Shaw

Capable

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

--Douglas Adams

Where Is...

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

--T.S. Eliot

My Own

My own mind is my own church.

--Thomas Paine

We All Quote

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Volatile

There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair.

--Anthony Lane

At Least One Laugh

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Brand New

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.

--Carl Bard

Forfeit

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

Anniversary Quote

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

--Fred Brook

Once You Are Real

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

--Margery Williams

i carry your heart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                          i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

--ee cummings

Science Clears

Science clears the fields on which technology can built.

--Werner Heisenberg

May You Dream

May you dream you are dreaming, in a warm soft bed.
And may the voices inside you that fill you with dread,
Make the sound of thousands of angels instead
Tonight where you might be laying your head.

--Patty Griffin

Bad Planning

Adventure is just bad planning.

--Roald Amundsen

Surfaces

Give me Truth;
For I am weary of the surfaces.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Faster, Faster, Faster

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

--Henry Ford

The Core

That is the core of a financial crisis, when too many people head to the exits simultaneously.

--Robert Bruner

Love Goes Beyond

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

--Viktor E. Frankl

Good Heart

If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.

--Bulwer Lytton

Real Generosity

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

--Albert Camus

Never Alone

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

--Rachel Carlson

When It Is Real

Memory, when it is real, can well take the place of that jumble of conflicting impressions we call the present.

--Scott Spencer

Santa Ana

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination....Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.

--Joan Didion

Fear Uniformity

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you manufacture gold.

--John Ruskin

Time to Relax

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

--Sydney J. Harris

All Cuckoos

We Americans are all cuckoos. We make our homes in the nests of other birds.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

No Sentiment

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

--Norman Mailer

Other People

Other people, in fact--if you keep the numbers small--are not always hell.

--Richard Ford

Mere Habit

The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.

--Jane Austen

The Damage of Haste

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.

--Theodore Roethke

First on the Dance Floor

When Clinton chose Gore as his running mate, I was on the moon. You see, I never found Gore to be the stiff, stuffy, robotic doofus that he was supposed to be. Okay, he was a bit shy and awkward, and kind of a nerd, but I never figured Lincoln or FDR to be the first on the dance floor, either.

--Melissa McEwan

By Degrees

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

--William Shakespeare (Othello)

Illusions

The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

--George Bernard Shaw

Majority Drools

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

--Mark Twain

As Settled

So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero

All Healing

All healing requires a movement into soul, which will be felt as outside the familiar structures of serious life.

--Thomas Moore

More Beautiful

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.

--Frank Lloyd Wright

Certain

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

--Francis Bacon

Moonlit

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

--William James

Not Necessary

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

--Albert Einstein

The Lie

Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.

--Pablo Picasso

Just Mount

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes
monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go
out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you
are taking.

--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Alternative Outcomes

None can change the past or our memories. But we change what a memory means to us by opening up to alternative outcomes of similar situations.

--Paul Marshall Reeder

Stepping Out

What really draws me to travel is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don't know, and may never know. Confronted by the foreign, we grow newly attentive to the details of the world, even as we make out, sometimes, the larger outline that lies behind them.

--Pico Iyer

Good Advice

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it; it is never of any use to oneself.

--Oscar Wilde

Forgotten Gift

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

--Albert Einstein

Exciting Opportunity

This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism--to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

--Michael Pollan

Things Longer

Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of things longer.

--Jerome K. Jerome

Guard Dog

Anger is the guard dog of denial.

--Donna Cunningham

Entirely Natural

I am a bit of a physics chauvinist. I think that according to the best of our current knowledge, our world is an entirely natural, physical place that does not depend on any supernatural powers.

--Taner Edis

Too Difficult

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

--Madeleine L'Engle

Time to Time

In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

--Edward P. Tryon

Eternal

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars...everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.

--Thornton Wilder

Spellbound

Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is--rather literally--to be spellbound.

--Alan W. Watts

Everything Is Different

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.

--Irene Peter

Slow Promises

The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Price Only

There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey.

--John Ruskin

In Evening Air

I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

--Theodore Roethke

Welcome

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

--Kurt Vonnegut

Theory

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

--Christopher Hitchens

The Opposite

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness.

--Anne Lamott

In Search

Life is the transcendent, psychic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.

--Jean-Paul Satre

Control Environment

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

--John Dewey

Mentally Faithful

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

--Thomas Paine

No Help

Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you.

--Alan W. Watts

Panics

Financial panics don't happen during depressions. They happen on the brink of depressions.

--James Grant (editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer)

The True Division

I began to see that the true division of importance in the world is not between different countries. The important division is between those who are committed to reason, to working out things, to understanding other people, to peaceful resolution of their differences...and those who don't think that.

--Justice Stephen Breyer

Spirit Of Love

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

--Henry Drummond

The Sea Is Dangerous

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reasons for remaining ashore.

--Vincent Van Gogh

Extremely Similar

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

--David Foster Wallace

As I Get Older

As I get older, and small pleasures can be hard to come by, I value the things that brought me happiness, any kind of happiness, a little more, the way you treasure the memory of a face or a place that you may not see again.

--Gary Kamiya

Duty

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

--George Bernard Shaw

Failure

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

--Jim Rohn

Our Own

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

Tangent

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

--Alfred Jarry

Society vs. Government

Society, in every form, is a blessing; government, even in its best form, is but a necessary evil.

--Thomas Paine

Not Virtuous

It is not virtuous in any way to put yourself down, or to punish yourself, because you do not feel you have lived up to your best behavior at any given time.

--Seth

You Can't Imagine

Generally speaking, I think it's a good idea to spend time in places you can't imagine yourself spending time in. At one time or another, for really no good reason, I have gone into soup kitchens, Baptist churches, porn shops, mortuaries, bingo parlors, Turkish baths. You learn things--typically that you don't know beans about the people there and that most of your assumptions were simplistic, naive, or just plain wrong.

--Mary Roach

Distracting

Death looming around every corner is a distraction from living.

--Eric Francis

Stable to Unstable

Over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system.

--Hyman Minsky

The Itch To Destroy

Evil is not so much the work of a few degenerate people or groups of people as it is the result of the indifference and negligence of the many. With spiritual arrogance goes the itch to destroy.

--William Sloane Coffin

Expectations

You must remember, once more, that expectations are the blocks with which you build your reality. There are no exceptions to this rule.

--Seth

No Evil

There is no such thing as evil. There is excess, there is the malignant warping of inner truth and original nature; but there is no evil. To call a thing or a person evil is to give it a power that it does not, and never will have.

--Brian Donohue

Rest In Peace

When one god dwells in all living beings, then why do you hate others? Why do you frown at others? Why do you become indignant towards others? Why do you use harsh words? Why do you try to rule and domineer over others? Why do you exploit folly? Is this not sheer ignorance? Get wisdom and rest in peace.

--Sivananda

Long Live

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

--Robinson Jeffers

Ice Cream

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

--Thornton Wilder

Success

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

--Andre Maurois

No Number

No number is significant in itself; its only significance is in relation to other numbers.

--Zell Kravinsky

Accept No...

An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted.

--Robert A. Heinlein

Bad Economics

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Theory

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

--William James

Classy

I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy.

--Bern Williams

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and stones are hard on bones
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything
But silence breaks the heart.

--Phyllis McGinley

Manner of Traveling

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

--Margaret B. Runbeck

Unfit

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

--The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

It Is Their Right, Their Duty

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

--The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

Incompatible

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

--James E. Starrs

Time

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

--William Shakespeare (Richard II)

Purely

All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Nothing Intelligent

If no one ever did anything silly, nothing intelligent would ever be done.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Other People

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

--Oscar Wilde

Ground the Hostility

"If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." This doesn't mean, however, that we're supposed to be doormats for others to walk on with hobnailed boots. It's my experience that people seldom want to walk over you until you lie down, so it's better to stay standing. Turning the other cheek means, "Be a lightning rod; ground the hostility." When you are insulted, call the other's attention to the hurt but do not retaliate in kind. Try--and believe me it is hard--try not even to resent it, for our job is to get to each other, not at each other. You know as well as I do that when enmities dim, lives glow all the stronger.

--William Sloane Coffin

Grace and Magic

Marriage is accomplished not only by human design and will, but also by grace and magic.

--Thomas Moore

Possess

Possessions possess.

--Paul Eldridge

Dominant Theme

The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different--because they are others, the strangers--has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.

--Lewis Hanke

Going On

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

--James Harvey Robinson

Truth

What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up.

--Edward Abbey

When It Deserves

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

--Mark Twain

Truly Great

Never lose sight of this important truth, that no one can be truly great until he has gained a knowledge of himself, a knowledge which can only be acquired by occasional retirement.

--Johann Georg von Zimmermann

Get A New One

The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.

--Ann Strong (1895, Minneapolis Tribune)

Prove Enduring

Works of art that prove enduring are intensely humanistic.

--Edward O. Wilson

For Her Beauty

Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake, nevertheless.

--Charles Frazier

Is Enough

To be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough...
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in the sea...
All things please the soul, but these things please the soul well.

--Walt Whitman (I Sing the Body Electric)

Satisfy

A man should go on living, if only to satisfy his curiosity.

--Yiddish proverb

Imperfect Mechanism

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

--Raymond Chandler

Each Age

Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.

--Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The Cure

Solitude is the cure for loneliness.

--Caroline W. Casey

Dare Not

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

--Thomas Paine

Better to Create

It is better to create than to be learned; creating is the true essence of life.

--Reinhold Niebuhr

Myopic Logic

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking.

--Jacques Cousteau

True Test

Marriage is the true test of character--to make a good life with your best critic. You have many critics, but your spouse is by far the best informed of all of them.

--Garrison Keillor

Doing vs. Imagining

Doing is a quantum leap from imagining. Thinking about swimming isn't much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away. The defense force inside of us wants us to be cautious, to stay away from anything as intense as a new kind of action. Its job is to protect us, and it categorically avoids anything resembling danger. But it's often wrong. Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.

--Barbara Sher

Believe Anything

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

--Miguel de Unamuno

Get The Message

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

--Malcolm Muggeridge

Already Arrived

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

--William Gibson

Poor Sort

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

--Lewis Carroll

Comfort and Risk

For the most part, most people most often choose comfort--the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have.

--John-Roger and Peter McWilliams

To Be Alone

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

--Jonathan Franzen

Does Exist

God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly pictured. That is, it is real as an Idea, and also incarnate in knowledge and work and love.

--Iris Murdoch

Inhibited

Faith inhibits learning.

--Daniel Boorstin

Praise of Intelligence

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

--Bertrand Russell

While We Live

Dum vivimus, vivamus!
(While we live, let us live!)

--Roman saying

Let Us Be True

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

--Matthew Arnold

Where

Where can we live but days?

--Philip Larkin

Behold

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.

--Walt Whitman

Less Detailed Copy

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

--Douglas Hofstadter

The Real Wolf

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

--D. H. Lawrence

Influenced in One's Beliefs

It is just as irrational to be influenced in one's beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.

--Thomas Nagel

Unexpected Outcomes

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.

--Buckminster Fuller

We're All Stooges

There are three kinds of people--I call them Larrys, Curlys, and Moes. The Larrys don't even know that there are three types; if they're told, it's an abstraction, because they cannot imagine anything beyond Larry-ness. The Curlys know about it, and recognize the pecking order, but find ways of living with it cheerfully...for they are the imaginative, creative ones. The Moes not only know about it, but exploit and perpetuate it.

--Rev. Ivan Stang (Church of the SubGenius)

Choice

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

--William James

Identity

Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

--Marshall McLuhan

A House

I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.

--Jerome K. Jerome

Eternal

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

--John Lennon

Capital Be

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.

--Henry David Thoreau

High Station

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

--Tennessee Williams

Rare Feeling

Being a kid means not feeling safe. That's why children are so happy when they are made to feel safe. It's a rare feeling.

--Lance Mannion

Maintenance

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Returns At Last

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

--Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

All Things

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

--Rene Descartes

What We Say To Ourselves

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. That's where the suffering comes from.

--Pema Chodron

All a Sham

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

--Anna Sewell

Me Too

I think the message of Jesus is "Me too" and "It's weird down here."

--Annie Lamott

Personality

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.

--Norman O. Brown

To Allow Mystery

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, "There could be more, there could be things we don't understand," is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.

--Barry Lopez

Disorganized

Is there a "disorganised religion"? Yes. As far as I know, Judaism has no hierarchy, not even any central theological arbiters. It's every schmendrick for himself! That may be a reason why Judaism has become a hostage to Zionism. I mean, what matters more, a bunch of words in an ancient language, or real estate?

--Mooser

Humans Are Divided

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

--Dave Eggers

Will Overcome

Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

--Fausto Coppi

The Gap

I have often thought that in the gap between what we say and what we feel lies all human sadness.

--George Rodriguez

One Thing To Know

I suspect there's only one thing to know about that other world. You don't go to it when you're dead. That other world exists only when you're in this one.

--Joy Williams

Before We Know

Before we know the words for it, out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time its only measure.

--Tom Stoppard

Wouldn't I Be Getting Ready

My feeling is, if we gave up what we have committed to as our life's work, wouldn't I be getting ready to die?

--Elizabeth Edwards

Spiritual Death

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Period of Consequences

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.

--Winston Churchill

You Can't

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

--Alan Greenspan

Original Sin

There is always that guilty knowledge of original sin in the back of all Americans' minds: the knowledge that we stole the land from the Native Americans and built it on the backs of African slaves.

--Mnemosyne

True Piety

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.

--George Santayana

Thin Thread

The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.

--Carl G. Jung

Cheap and Dangerous

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

--George Bernard Shaw

Tubes

Try as we might, we'll never be fully comfortable soaring above the earth at hundreds of miles per hour in pressurized tubes.

--Patrick Smith

Mind and Spirit

Those who want the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

--Harry S Truman

That's Funny

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

--Isaac Asimov

Satisfied

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

--Niccolo Machiavelli

Special Form

Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.

--Norman Mailer

Puny Secrets

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

--Marshall McLuhan

Nobody Is Looking

Character is what you do when nobody is looking.

--Henry Huffman

Living Conditions

The living conditions of the poor must be improved if we really want to save our environment.

--Wangari Maathai

Tragedy of Life

The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

--Adam Gopnik

Mutual

One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.

--Rosalind Coward

More Valuable

If a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are some things more valuable than life.

--Poppy Z. Brite

No Snowflake

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

--Zen proverb

Every Love

Every love relationship is based on unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love.

--Milan Kundera

Both Atheists

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

--Stephen Henry Roberts

Cultured Place

The world is now a cultured place, where the devil has evolved accordingly...he's shed his horns and tail and crooked fingers.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Final

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

--Molly Ivins (final paragraph of final column, January 12, 2007)

Understood

The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

--Molly Ivins

Not a Picture on a Wall

Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television program you can decide you just don't care for. Our entire lives are set into and written by the warp and woof of politics. Political decisions affect your life every day in thousands of way--whether the food you eat is safe, what books your children read in school, how deep you will be buried when you die, if the lady who dyes your hair is competent, how safe your money is in stocks or banks, whether you have a job, whether your kid has to go fight in a war, who is qualified to prescribe your eyeglasses--that's all politics.

--Molly Ivins

Modern States

The belief that modern states can continue indefinitely to act as if they were autonomous units, competing with each other to acquire the power to destroy life on a colossal scale, is not only the most insidious of illusions but an unacknowledged pathology.

--Anne Baring

There Comes A Yes

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends.

--Wallace Stevens

The Sound It Makes

I recognize happiness by the sound it makes when it leaves.

--Jacques Prévert

Pro-Knife

I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

--Molly Ivins

Sometimes

Sometimes you don't know where you're supposed to be until you get there.

--Willie Randolph

Encourage More

Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize.

--Elizabeth Harrison

A Million

A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.

--Thomas Pynchon

Demand Progress

Hope doesn't demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.

--Christopher Lasch

Promise Happiness

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

--Emile Zola

Third Form

The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about.

--Martin E.P. Seligman

Only Time

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.

--Art Buchwald

Cheerfully

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

--Blaise Pascal

Imaginary Beings

There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Strange Beast

If we were to judge the U.S. by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

--George Monbiot

Called to Speak

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Evil People

Evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives.

--George W. Bush (interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, October 30, 2006)

Eternal

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

--Marshall McLuhan

The Cost of a Thing

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

--Henry David Thoreau

Prayer

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire.

--Mark Twain (The War Prayer)

Never Enough

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

--Eric Hoffer

The Unforeseen

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

--Philip Roth

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence.

--Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

Friendship

I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma.

--Gerald R. Ford (2005 interview embargoed until his death)