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)