Clever Devil

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
--C. S. Lewis

Shareholder Value

American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically don't want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.
--Allen Sinai (chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics)

The Mind

It's not the job of the mind to tell us who we are.
--A.H. Almaas

Dream In The Body

Sickness is a dream in the body, and symptoms are possessed of what the physicist David Bohm calls "soma-significance." They mean something. They have wisdom, metaphoric power, method in their madness. They are one of the languages the soul uses to get across to us something about itself.
--Gregg Levoy

Age Is Opportunity

For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Plan

Everyone has a plan until they've been hit.
--Joe Louis

Time Affluent

There's often a rush to trade time for money, even though a variety of studies have found people who are "time affluent" are happier than those who are materially affluent.
--Laura Rowley

You Sigh

Most movies are simpleminded and pretend it is earth-shakingly important whether this boy and this girl mate forever, when a lot of young romance is just window-shopping and role-playing, and everyone knows it. You break up, you sigh, you move on. The process is so universal that with some people, you sigh as you meet them, in anticipation.
--Roger Ebert

True Spirit

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Just Are

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Heartbeats

I heard on the radio that we creatures have about a billion and a half heartbeats to use. Voles and birds use theirs fast as do meth heads and stockbrokers, while whales and elephants are slower. This morning I'm thinking of recounting mine to see exactly where I am.
--Jim Harrison

Most Singular Difference

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
--J. D. Salinger

Vanity

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.
--Henrich Heine

Elitist

Your life may depend on an arrogant elitist who happens to know what he's doing.
--Garrison Keillor

Loss of Time

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they're being honest--including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books.
--George Packer

The Truth

When there is no authority to the truth, prejudices thrive.
--David Aaronovitch

Dither

People I hardly know still keep asking me to be their Facebook friend. What do I do? It's a bit impolite to ignore their request, which I often do by default. It's rude to say No. And it's a bit false to say Yes. So I dither.
--Dharmaruci

Calamity

It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.
--Frank Kermode

Cultivate

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.
--Charlotte Brontë

Indispensable

The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.
--Charles de Gaulle

Just a Dream

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see,
Are the dreams all made solid,
Are the dreams all made real.,
All of the buildings, all of those cars,
Were once just a dream
In somebody's head.
--Peter Gabriel (Mercy Street)

Catcher In The Rye

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
--J. D. Salinger

Savage

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
--Bertrand Russell

Wellness

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
--Abraham Maslow

A Dearth

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
--John Paul Stevens

On and On

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Blur Line

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
--Arnold Toynbee

Quite Insane

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
--Nikola Tesla

Too Much

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
--William Wordsworth

Quest

He says the primal quest
ain't nothin' but a second guess.
Sometimes you just do your best
to compromise.
--Dave Carter

Releases It

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our Neighbor

Our neighbor is anyone who needs assistance, whether friend or stranger. We cannot expect to correct all the ills of the world but we can help the people with whom we come in contact. This is our spiritual service.
--Elizabeth Sand Turner

The Blues

White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.
--August Wilson (title character, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)

The Art...

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.
--Marcus Aurelius

Anything Else

The sad fact of contemporary American economic culture is atomistic individualism. Anything else is decried as communism.
--Dave Hanson

More Rational

My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by. I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.
--Stewart Brand

Acceptable

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
--Jaron Lanier

Too Vast

The mind considering itself--I shudder; it is too vast, a space without dimension, filled with cosmic events that are silent and immaterial.
--E. L. Doctorow

What You Can

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
--Theodore Roosevelt

Affection

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
--C. S. Lewis

Grace

Gracefulness is an idea belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of difficulty; there is required a small inflexion of the body.
--Edmund Burke

Influx

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
--Henry Thoreau

Short Period

Life is a short period of time in which we are alive.
--Philip Roth

Better To See

It is better to see God in everything than to try and figure it out.
--Neem Karoli Baba

To Attend

You lose half the enjoyment in life when you refuse to attend.
--Lewis Carroll

Do Not Quite

We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Real Truth

The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.
--Dale Andreatta

Shut Down

If we were to care about every person suffering on this planet, life would shut down.
--David Shore

The Majority

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Broken

Both parties understand that the current system is broken. But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It's a very complicated issue.
--House Speaker "Nancy Pelosi" via The Onion

Cannot Feel

People in a hurry cannot feel.
--Alan Watts

Equipment

Stories are equipment for living.
--Robert McKee

Telling Lies

Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random: it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.
--B. S. Johnson

The Slime

Relationships have a way of rubbing our noses in the slime of life--an experience we would rather forego, but one that offers an important exposure to our own depth.
--Thomas Moore

Frugally

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
--Alice Walker

Real Magic

Real magic doesn't come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.
--Martha Beck

For Change

We're hankering for change but haven't any notion as to where we are headed.
--Frederick Woodruff

Only Thing

Consciousness is the only thing in the world and the greatest mystery.
--Martin Amis

Morality

The political and personal morality of the West, especially in the United States, is...utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which enables confused rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals.
--Alan W. Watts

Think Before

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
--Lewis Carroll

Host

The word "host" is related through Indo-European roots to the words "hostile" and "hostage."
--Dwight Garner

Simply the Opinion

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
--Oscar Wilde

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

Courage

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
--Henri Matisse

Preschool

Goldman Sachs has 14 business principles, many of which could apply to a preschool. ("We stress creativity and imagination.")
--Daniel Gross

They Will End

This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good--really, really, consistently good--I have become aware that they will end.
--Judith Warner

Enlightenment

From the dawn of human consciousness, when people became aware that they were going to die and didn't like the idea, there have always been "gurus," and priests and preachers, shamans, wizards, oracles, spiritual "advisors," and self-help "experts," who've seen the quest for enlightenment and the search for heaven as a opportunity to make a fast buck.
--Lance Mannion

Rational

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.
--Amy Wallace

Realism

I've always thought sports teach realism: What you can do, what you can't, how to win, how to lose, how to deal with it.
--Gene Lyons

Evil

Bailing out corporations with billions (who then give their executives lavish bonuses) while we cannot help those in desperate need and misery--this is the epitome of evil.
--Andy Vortex

Individual

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
--Ambrose Bierce

Since the Days

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Surely Tested

Man's mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality. This can be easily and surely tested by going to church. When anything serious is being said, the congregation dozes or squirms. But if the ranter--I mean the reverend--begins some old wives' tale, everyone wakes up and strains to hear.
--Desiderus Erasmus (The Praise of Folly, circa 1668)

Reasons

The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.
--Jean Renoir

Truth

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.
--Lillian Hellman

Fragile and Forgettable

That is what fall means...It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree.
--Garrison Keillor

Hawaii

You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii.
--Michelle Obama

Pick Battles

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
--Jonathan Kozol

Unique Gift

That is the unique gift that humans have above all animals: they can share their death with each other.
--William Barrett

Doubts

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.
--Bruce Springsteen

Holding

There is no greater agony than holding an untold story inside of you.
--Maya Angelou

New Media

This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country.
--Garrison Keillor