Just Guessing

Nobody knows anything. We're all just guessing.
--Kenneth Lonergan

Happiness Is...

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
--George Burns

Paradox of Death

This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.
--Todd May

Paying Attention

Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention, of deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.
--Margaret Visser

Our Responsibility

When will we begin to recognize that we can be a civilization worthy of the name only if we understand our responsibility to care for one another?
--Nathan L. Jaschik

Just Sad

Capitalism is weird. I can't tell if it's ironic, or just sad.
--Jon Stewart

Enshrined

The notion that we give criminal trials only to people who speak respectfully about America has yet to be enshrined in the Constitution.
--Dahlia Lithwick

Stories

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
--Tim O'Brien

Die Correctly

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
--Lawrence Durrell

Great Life

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.
--Lee Iacocca

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