Sweet and Fitting

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. *

--Wilfred Owen

* It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

Paradox Time

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

--Bertrand Russell

Get It Right

You don't have to get it right the first time.

--Barbara Sher

Can't Laugh

Listen, if you can't laugh at death, you really have no right to be here.

--Robert Altman

A Little Hunger

If you want your children to have a peaceful life, let them suffer a little hunger and a little coldness.

--Chinese proverb

The Present

Do not live in the past, do not live in the future; concentrate the mind on the present moment.

--Buddha

Time Changes

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

--Andy Warhol

Pause in the Action

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

--Guillaume Apollinaire

Trust, Too

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

--John Masefield

Half Awake

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

--William James

Cure the Soul (Anniversary Quote)

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

--Oscar Wilde

In Short

The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical--our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal.

--Harold Kushner

Slightly Faster

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

--Kim Stanley Robinson

The Pass-Word

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy.

--Walt Whitman

So Little

It takes so little to make people happy. Just a touch, if we know how to give it, just a word fitly spoken, a slight readjustment of some bolt or pin or bearing in the delicate machinery of a soul.

--Frank Crane

Let America

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

--Langston Hughes

Do Continuously

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Rain Is Grace

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

--John Updike

What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...

--Walt Whitman (preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass)