Avoid

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
--Winston Churchill

Pretend

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.
--Cary Grant

Right

Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
--Viktor E. Frankl

Rare

What would humans be without love? "Rare," said Death.
--Terry Pratchett

Thanks

I'm still an atheist, thank God.
--Luis Bunuel

Approximately

It is better to be approximately correct, than precisely wrong.
--Sam Kash Kachigan

Instincts

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war...Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
--C. S. Lewis

Gradual

Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.
--John Michael Greer

Initiations

Marriage is not unadulterated happiness, but is rather another of life's initiations.
--Thomas Moore

Can't Steer

The will is never free--it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car--it can't steer.
--Joyce Cary

Variation of Wave

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
--Albert Einstein

Movement

Learning is movement from moment to moment.
--J. Krishnamurti

Perfect Sense

To spend time with these Indiana community bankers is to step into an alternate universe, where everything sounds a little strange because it makes perfect sense. You hear things like, "If you don't understand the risk you're taking, don't take it." And, "We want to be around for decades, so we're not focused on the next quarter."
--David Segal

Serious and Studious

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
--William Butler Yeats

Dust

Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.
--Marianne Moore

J.S. Bach

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
--Dr. Lewis Thomas

Deep Impulses

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
--Bertrand Russell

What Is It Really?

This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centers of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe--perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy--and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves.
--Dennis Elwell

Seize It, Let Go Of It

Sartaj was thinking about how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.
--Vikram Chandra

Planted the Tree

When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.
--Vietnamese proverb