Caring People

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers--so many caring people in this world.
--Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Humans

It was not simply a question of rescheduling a ritual, a party or a gathering; these celebrations, from all the faiths and from none, push back against the dominance of the long winter night. No one is more essential to them than humans between, say, ages 5 and 9, who are balanced between the world of reason and the world of magic.
--Jim Dwyer

Barbarism

Self-government and its institutions--public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries--are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.
--Charles P. Pierce

Amendments

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.
--Kurt Weldon

Reverence

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
--Garry Wills

Terrible Vastness

Apparitions and massacres both come out of nowhere, like dispatches from a world that's beyond our comprehension, their existence so momentous and irrational that they seem to demand from us items of sacrifice and tribute. It is dark now in Newtown, but they are still laying wreaths and flowers, just as they will for days and days, compelled to commemorate something they can hardly believe happened; to touch a terrible vastness they can't begin to understand.
--Justin Peters

Too Much

Too much information is almost always a turnoff. Note how "Foie Gras" sounds delightful, yet "Spreadable Ruptured Liver" does not.
--Carina Chocano

Right and Wrong

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?
--William Lloyd Garrison

None Of You

People who are not Syrian ask me the most painful question, "Why do your people kill each other?" I usually give long-winded explanations, gesturing with my hands but without eye contact, offering historical and logical precedents of tyranny and oppression and revolution and freedom. But I don't tell them what I should, not out of kindness, but out of pity and because it scares me to admit how hardened I've become over the last 20 months: Don't you dare, even for one second, believe that your people and your cities are immune to what happened to my country, my friend. None of you are.
--Amal Hanano

Intent

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Purpose

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
--Bertrand Russell

Undecided

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
--Winston Churchill

Heart

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born--or before you're born--and it's the last thing you hear.
--Dave Brubeck

Rules

Following a list of rules, our hearts are not free to dance in response to another--we are only dully plodding along in an imitation waltz.
--Suzanne Clothier

Happen

What could have happened did happen.
--Dan Jenkins

Time

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.
--Fiona Apple

Measure

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor: he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
--Mark Twain

Quiet

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
--Bertrand Russell

Help

Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.
It is the first great prayer.
--Anne Lamott

Discretion

Listen, all I can say is I was a lot more discreet as a candidate than I was in real life. Can I say that? Maybe it's indiscreet to talk about discretion.
--Elizabeth Warren

Lincoln

The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world.
--Leo Tolstoy

Strange Pull

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
 It will not lead you astray.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Licking

Conservatives lost, and now they are just licking their wounds. Licking your wounds was, ironically, also part of their health care plan.
--Amanda Reckinwith

Virtue

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
--Oscar Wilde

Happiness

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
--Jack Gilbert

Poured

I am not a self-made man by any stretch of the imagination. There have been countless people that poured into me in a way that changed my life.
--R.A. Dickey

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
--Ernest Hemingway

Experience

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
--Fred Brooks

Comparisons

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't do any good to compare disasters. The one that you live through is the one with the most impact. Period.
--Jeanette D.

Just Slowly Enough

Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear quite clearly, but is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians.
--Bill McKibben

Latino

Mitt Romney actually endorsed Arizona's immigration policies. You can't fix this by flashing more pictures of brown people. This is not a "branding problem." This is a "problem problem." Latino voters didn't go crazy. Latino voters went voter.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bullshit

I really hate bullshit. I hate it from other people, and I hate it from myself. The more bullshit there is in this world, the less clarity we have about the world around us. Bullshit is the clarity killer. It is the enemy of objectivity.
--Razib Khan

Government

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
--John Adams

Communal

We vote because it is something we do together, for one another. We do not vote to take something back from someone else. We do not vote in a bubble, even if we think we do. Voting is communal, whether we want to look at it that way or not.
--Charles P. Pierce

Commonwealth

A commitment to being part of a self-governing political commonwealth is the only means of common protection we have left, and to deny that is to whistle your way past the true nature of the threat.
--Charles P. Pierce

Weather

We can't say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.
--Eric Pooley (senior vice president, Environmental Defense Fund)

Believer

God is where the opportunistic believer wants him to be.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Unite

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
--Thomas Jefferson (Inaugural Address, March 1801)

Good Religion

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
--G. K. Chesterton

Agnostic

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.
--H.L. Mencken

Concentration

Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.
--Arnold Palmer

An Election

Is an election--like the interstate highways, or the GI Bill--something we own in common, something we do together?
--Charles P. Pierce

Writing

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
--E. L. Doctorow

Smooth

Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death.
--Neil Young

Work

A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.
--Bertrand Russell

Evolution

Of course like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.
--Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D. (former president of Princeton University, during 1912 campaign for president)

All the Answers

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don't have all the answers, to think that they do.
--Bill Maher

Common Good

Strengthening the common good is a lot harder than protecting the comforts of a few.
--Yonce Shelton

New Technology

We shouldn't jump at a new technology simply because it has advantages; only time and study will reveal its disadvantages and show the value of what we've left behind.
--Justin B. Hollander

Giving

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
--George Eliot

Atheism

What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?
--Slavoj Zizek

1930s

Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen. Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, an inability to co-operate and failure to stay ahead of events.
--Martin Wolf

Mad Influx

In general, do those who routinely diagnose ADHD and prescribe drugs for it ever meditate on just how awfully strange our sensorium has become, and how rare it would be that we would perfectly adapt to this mad influx of swirling inputs?
--Cary Tennis

Inequality

Absolute freedom is impossible; humans are social animals, and society is a give-and-take. I'm not arguing for absolute egalitarianism, I'm saying that the fact that there will always be some level of inequality in a society does not prove that the current level of inequality is appropriate; it's a non sequitur.
--A Real New Yorker

Love, Fear

It used to be possible for me to gauge the depth of my love for someone by the intensity of the fear created in my contemplation of their death.
--Suzanne Clothier

Empathy

The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments. The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created.
--Ryan Rhodes (Tea Party activist from Iowa)

Notice

This world is too bad. We must notice it.
--Bertrand Russell

Agenda

Environmentalists have always had an agenda to put nature above man. If they can find an end to their means, they don't care how it happens. If they can do it under the guise of global warming and climate change, they will do it.
--Donna Holt (leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a Tea Party affiliate)

Liberty

For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.
--James Madison

Curse

I would trust politicians more if they would curse like normal human beings on occasion.
--Jon Valjon

Dogmatic

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.
--George Romney (letter to Barry Goldwater, December 21, 1964)

Not You

One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That's not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.
--Barack Obama

Each Other's Hands

The bloodiest and most difficult-to-forgive mistakes get made when we forget that we are all, whatever the role we choose in this particular transaction, in each other's hands.
--David Roth

Dimensions

Trying to hate Obamacare while taking pride in Romneycare is more than even a national politician can do without access to higher spatial dimensions.
--Stevens R. Miller

Time

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
--Bertrand Russell

Stole It

Now look, over there: That teacher/fireman/NFL referee has something you don't have! That person stole it from you. Go get 'em. We'll wait right here on our piles of money while you and him fight.
--Charles P. Pierce

Values

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong.
--Michael Sandel

Blood

The only thing that seems to mobilize the Arab street is a movie, a cartoon or an insult, but not the pool of blood in Syria.
--Syrian activist on Twitter

Idiot

What he did was to say it worked in Massachusetts, but it can't work nationally. The problem he has is that's a totally illogical position, and he looks like an idiot.
--Jonathan Gruber (MIT economist who helped develop the health-care plan in that state)

Every Particle

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
--Jonathan Franzen

One Another

We must love one another or die.
--W.H. Auden ("September 1, 1939")

Liberty

Ignorance is the first threat to liberty. The second is to treat ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings.
--Vartan Gregorian

Fairly

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
--Anonymous

Dreams

We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future.
--Richard Feynman (1964)

Imaginary

This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.
--Jamelle Bouie

Machines

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
--Bertrand Russell

Labor Unions

Thirty years of Reaganomics and they could never figure out that by destroying labor unions, they destroyed the middle class which was the economic engine of America.
--Humuhumunukunukuapuaa

Theory

In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time.
--National Academy of Sciences

Portals

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
--James Joyce

Crude Matter

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
--Yoda

Play

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
--Arthur C. Clarke

Promises

Little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.
--Dean Koontz

Gears

Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.
--Charles Schultz

A Book

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
--Mark Twain

Book of Spells

I remain convinced that American conservative thought is now not a philosophy but, rather, a book of spells, a series of conjuring words that have meaning only to the initiates.
--Charles P. Pierce

Metaphor

On close inspection, "depression is a chemical imbalance" turns out to be every bit as much a model, a metaphor, a story, as "depression is an excess of black bile."
--Katherine Sharpe

Priority Option

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
--Mark Twain

Pleasure

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.
--Muriel Spark

The Sum

Everything is the sum of the past...There is nothing, not even the human soul, the highest spiritual manifestation we know of, that does not come within this universal law.
--Teilhard de Chardin

He Owes

All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilisation, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
--Tom Paine

Stand In

Every variety of nationalism, in every country in the world, involves some degree of invention, imagination and amnesia, standing in for actual history.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Fix

The entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If you can fix the broken piece, everything can go right back.
--Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar

Aware

Humankind is no less than the universe having become aware of itself.
--Drew Monkman

Why

The first question which we have a right to ask will be, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
--Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)

Chant the Beauty

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cheap Fuel

Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself--it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
--Bill McKibben

His Heaven

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.
--Mark Twain

Language

Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.
--Wade Davis

Forgive

My experience is long and my memory is good, and I know that countless times, I have stood in a place diametrically opposed to the path my soul would have me take. And for this, I have had to find a way to forgive myself.
--Suzanne Clothier

33 Times

This was the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.
--Ezra Klein

Machine

I'm content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue.
--Lewis Lapham

Getting the Hell Out

It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
--Tim Kreider

Great Things

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
--Leonard Bernstein

Interpretation

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation.
--Mark Doty

Not Real Good

My story is such that I'm always kind of waiting for the next trauma around the corner. I'm not real good at celebration. I've never done it well.
--R.A. Dickey

Essence

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
--Thomas Pynchon

Hunch

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
--Lily Tomlin

False Separation

The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected.
--Nathan Jurgenson

Desperate

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?
--Henry David Thoreau

Control

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
--Mario Andretti

Nuts

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
--Franz Kafka

Italian

Secret to life, marry an Italian.
--Nora Ephron (her contribution to "Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure")

Attention

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.
--Simone Weil

Inconceivable

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.
--Andre Maurois

Find Them

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them.
--Jim Croce

Dangerous

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
--T. H. Huxley

Late Into the Universe

Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
--Richard Dawkins

Happens

Every time we say Let there be! in any form, something happens.
--Stella Terrill Mann

Something Exciting

I am still expecting something exciting, drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas.
--Edmund Wilson

New and Retro

Just as it can be good to avoid new stuff just because it's new, it's good to avoid remaining retro just for the sake of remaining retro.
--J.D. Smith

Let Love Flow

What I find so deeply moving is the animal willingness to let love flow and not block it. Never once have I seen a fat dog draw back in shame from a loving hand that offered a belly rub, nor a dog who would turn away affectionate attention because of guilt over past misdeeds.
--Suzanne Clothier

Work

Somewhere in your career your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful, and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.
--Ben Kingsley

Bravery

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
--Wendell Phillips

The Story

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it and copy it.
--Jules Renard

Comfortable

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
--Mark Twain

Minority

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
--Ralph Ellison

Survive

Our almost-instinct almost true
What will survive of us is love.
--Philip Larkin

Luck

Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck--and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
--Michael Lewis

The Opposite

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.
--Marina Keegan

Fate

To love is to give hostages to fate.
--Jo Coudert

Attention and Awareness

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
--David Foster Wallace

Digital Media

I bow to no one in my loyalty to digital media. Our household has two iPads, two Kindles, and a Nook. They are the future, and for traveling they can't be beat. But I am reminded that five centuries' worth of ergonomic advancements in laying out printed material have not been overturned in one decade. There is still something very nice about the look, feel, and impression on the eye, the senses, and the memory of a well-designed physical magazine or book.
--James Fallows

Education

Education is simply the soul of society as it passes from one generation to another.
--G. K. Chesterton

Worries

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
--Mark Twain

Irony

Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends.
--Paul Fussell

Clear

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
--Wislawa Szymborska (In Praise of Self-Deprecation)

Special Act

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
--Charles Darwin

Decisions

Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.
--Dean Koontz

Expert

Define expert as you will, but it's rarely warranted in any field by but a tiny handful.
--Suzanne Clothier

Attention

We create ourselves by how we invest the energy of our attention.
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Storm

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.
--Mark Twain

Consumer Benefit

Advertising isn't interested in political regeneration. The purpose is to nurture foolish thoughts, and the laziness of mind suckled at the silicone breasts of CBS and Disney counts as a consumer benefit.
--Lewis Lapham

Trustworthy

A liberal, free market society needs "trust in the trustworthy" as the core of its values, not just as a Quixotic moral "extra."
--Geoffrey Hosking

Swing Voters

Expect to hear complaints from the right that it's unfair for Obama to come out with positions in an election year that appeal to swing voters.
--Daniel Gross

Freedom to Marry

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
--Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority in Loving v. Virginia (1967)

Procrastination

Worry is not productive; it's a kind of procrastination.
--Tim Kreider

Capitalism

Although capitalists would prefer we think otherwise, human ingenuity created capitalism--not the other way around.
--Frank Joyce

Together

We betray so much so casually when we choose to forget about the only thing that's really worth caring about, which is the only thing we've all got, which is each other--which is all of us, all of us together or all of us lost.
--David Roth

Tenderness

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us.
--Dean Koontz

Word Work

Word-work is sublime...because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
--Toni Morrison

Distress

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.
--Karl Marx

Everybody Worships

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
--David Foster Wallace

Jealous

God is indeed a jealous God.
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.
--Emily Dickinson

Post-Literate

The post-literate sensibility is offended by anything that isn't television, views with suspicion the compound sentence, the subordinate clause, words of more than three syllables.
--Lewis Lapham

Communicate

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
--J. B. Priestley

Regeneration

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.
--George Orwell

Partially Insane

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
--Mark Twain

Old Men

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
--T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

No Meaning

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
--C.S. Lewis

Love and Death

Love is stronger than death.
--Paul Tillich

Particular

Our lessons in this lifetime are simply our struggles to smooth the flow of life through and around our particular flaws.
--Suzanne Clothier

In Death

We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women--meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices--live as if death is not a part of life but only an end.
--Dean Koontz

Emotion

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
--Mark Twain

Encourages

In marriage, when those tight times happen, when you feel, "Oh, shit, this is terrible, I'm outta here," you take it as an opportunity to learn more about each other, get closer, and enlarge your love. Then that precious feeling kind of pulls you together and encourages you in the next tough time.
--Jeff Bridges

Noise

Relationships of every kind are riddled with overinterpreted noise. How many angry exchanges are triggered by extraneous comments or fleeting looks, many of which are attributable to passing moods?
--Ted Cadsby

The Choice

The observer's choice of what he shall look for has an inescapable consequence for what he will find.
--John Archibald Wheeler (physicist)

Soul

Soul is most pregnant and ready to be born in relationships, since we can't be human without them. We cannot save our soul, much less find it, alone.
--Gary Zukav

Dread

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

Hour of Death

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
--Marcel Proust

All Created Things

By means of all created things without exception, the divine assaults us, penetrates us and molds us.
--Teilhard de Chardin

Regrets

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.
--Alexander Payne

Peace

Peace isn't a place with no stress, but a place where you take the stress as it comes, in stride, and don't let it rule you. You let it flow through you, and then smile and breathe.
--Leo Babauta

Humane

The responsibility for being humane lies strictly within our own hearts; we cannot and should not depend on external authorities to guide us.  
--Suzanne Clothier

Coherence

Coherence seems a rare thing, and the human mind is sometimes quite careless about insisting on it. In the long run, however, I think our lack of coherence eats at us, undermines the sureness with which we know our own minds, and thus blocks us from knowing our souls.
--Suzanne Clothier

Texts

Writing extended texts for publication is a major cognitive challenge, even for professionals who compose for a living.
--Ronald Kellogg

Euphoria

Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That's the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
--Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

Looking At That Day

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day. Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don't even always notice them--that's what life is.
--Alexander Payne

Our Link

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.
--Milan Kundera

Levelers

You can't always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Church and State

We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.
--Ronald Reagan (1984)

Eternity

What we do not know--the destiny of the soul, the nature of eternity--is the knowledge that matters most, and only when we recognize this truth can we live with the humility required in the face of eternity.
--Dean Koontz

Know

And what you do not know is the only thing you know.
--T.S. Eliot

Wars

Wars are always, in Lincoln's perfectly chosen word, astounding. They produce results that we can hardly imagine when they start. It is not that wars are always wrong. It is that wars are always wars, good for destroying things that must be destroyed...but useless for doing anything more.
--Adam Gopnik

Conservative

Though innately conservative, rural people do understand that if you skimp on fertilizer in April, you'll have a poor hay crop come September and a hard time getting your livestock through the winter.
--Gene Lyons

The Future

Oh, my god, the future is preparing to leave without me...again.
--Grant McCracken

What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who 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.
--Walt Whitman

Enormous

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
--Philip Larkin

Here and Now

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
--T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

Bravery

You can say shocking, scandalous things about Muslims, and opinion makers do, then push out their chins as if they've been brave.
--China Miéville

Kind

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass on the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything we love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
--Sam Harris

Extreme Weather

Scientists know that the increasing load of greenhouse gases we're pumping into the atmosphere doesn't "cause" extreme weather. But it does raise the odds, just as a diet of triple bacon cheeseburgers raises the odds of heart disease.
--Michael D. Lemonick

Humor

Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?

Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

Calvin: (after a long pause) I can't tell if that's funny or really scary.
--Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

Kindness

Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.
--Dean Koontz

One Life

This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
--General Omar N. Bradley

Ordinary Moments

Well, that's what life is--this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.
--Alexander Payne

Most Important

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Secret

I was a "big success," people told me, but the secret I never spoke in reply or anytime was my belief that I had long ago given up on me--the one whom others, in equations of family, love, and work, relied upon--choosing the easy route over a path toward things they don't necessarily pay you or pat you on the back for.
--Margaret Roach

Dust

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
--Genesis 3:19 (King James Version)

Forgetting

My grandmother showed me that we are more than the sum of our memories. She taught me the vital importance of forgetting; and that sometimes it's only our commitment to remembering that prevents us from accepting the love and peace that surrounds us.
--Robert Leleux

American Dream

For a while, life was good. I married the wonderful man I'd been dating for several years. We bought a house. Saved money. My kids got to take after-school classes. All we needed was the golden retriever, and we would be living the American dream.
--Catherine Lane

Surprises

Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.
--Bill Watterson

You Never Know

All of us should say "I love you" to the people we care about. We should do it because you never know.
--Jeffrey Zaslow

First Sight

Cynics wil tell you that love at first sight is a myth, but their opinion is not to be respected, and only reveals the sad condition of their hearts.
--Dean Koontz

Public Utility

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.
--Benjamin Franklin

Animals

Animals make us human.
--Temple Grandin

Innocence

Innocence is neither naive nor unhip; innocence is the condition of deepest bliss.
--Dean Koontz

Product

If God manifested himself to us, he would do so in the form of a product advertised on TV.
--Philip K. Dick

Trapped

Politicians are actors trapped in the same part.
--Maureen Dowd

Tools

Men have become the tools of their tools.
--Henry David Thoreau

I and You

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case.
--Sydney J. Harris

Set Our Course

We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.
--General Omar Bradley

Conservative

I do not know which makes a man more conservative--to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
--John Maynard Keynes

Reason

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
--Thomas Paine

Mistakes

Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person's soul.
--Ed Sanders

Becoming

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
--Johann von Goethe

Preferences

Having preferences means having weaknesses.
--Magnus Carlsen (chess Grandmaster)

Preference & Fact

The only people who are wrong are those who try to pretend that "preference" and "fact" are synonyms.
--Lisa K.

Death

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
--Epicurus

Joy

Nothing makes me feel better--calmer, clearer and happier--than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy.
--Pico Iyer

Marketing Game

It's sad, isn't it, that nowhere in the complex machinations of politicians, in the development of their campaign strategies, is there the slightest hint of a nod towards what's best for America. It's all a blatant marketing game.
--Clavis

Very Fast

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
--Marshall McLuhan

The Surface

Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Happy

People are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
--Abraham Lincoln

Questions & Answers

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
--Anonymous

A Kiss

You speak of a kiss as if it were the commonest thing in the world, as if it were an amenity as banal as a razor blade. (As if it grew on trees.)
--Kara Vanderbijl

Human

The severely disabled challenge us by their existence. They implicitly ask, "Do you consider me human?" They suggest how arduous it is to be human. They remind us of death.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Unsupported

There are many men who are fond of making an unsupported statement under the apprehension that they have posited an argument.
--F.C. Lane

Walls

Walls are geometry put into humanity's service. True, they create divisions and distinctions, but so does reason.
--Costica Bradatan

Rest

Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
--Thomas Merton

Liberty

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.
--Abraham Lincoln

Sufffering

Suffering is part of life and it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.
--Rick Santorum (town hall meeting in Iowa, November 18, 2011)

Enmeshed

It is precisely our enmeshments that make us who we are and give our lives meaning.
--Kathy Rudy