Assorted Quotations
08.3
These are just assorted quotes picked up over the years. Current 3-18-08. There is no order here, except that the last group has already been published in my Yijing Commentary and towards the end I've made a beginning of sorting quotes by author.
The link below is the best search engine I know for finding quotes or verifying authors. It's not the simple search engine:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search Pick a string of the four or five words most likely to be unique to the quote and the least likely to have been altered in the retelling. Then enter these in the box "Contains the entire phrase".
If you found this page through a quote search and not my website, this is also available as a zipped .rtf file at
http://www.hermetica.info/AllQuotes.zip
New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you spiritual. It's right above the crack of your ass. And it translates to "beef with broccoli." The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual. You're just high.
Bill Maher
New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," ooh, you're a huge asshole.
Bill Maher
Dao is the dynamic field of natural law in whose context all else takes place
Bruce Hamerslough
A man is exactly as great as the tide surging beneath him
Bismarck
The injustice we seed grows a poison fruit, one that we inevitably end up eating.
Gerry Spence
"Secret? There is no secret.
"Anyone with eyes can see the way to live: by watching life, observing nature and cooperating with it, making common cause with the process of existence.
"By living life for itself, don't you see, deriving pleasure from the gift of pure being.
"Life is its own answer. Accept it and enjoy it day by day. Live as well as possible; expect no more. Destroy nothing; humble nothing; look for fault in nothing. Leave unsullied and untouched all that is beautiful. Hold that which lives in all reverence; for life is given by the sovereign of our universe, given to be savored, to be luxuriated in, to be respected.
"But that's no secret. You're intelligent. You know, as well as I, what has to be done.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln
Americans have a curiosity a mile wide and an inch deep.
Russian visitor
Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Seventeen times of trying to commit suicide, I think it’s time to give up.
Sam Ross, a disabled Iraq veteran now in a mental hospital.
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" "See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars." And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. The Last Rites of the Bokononist faith, Kurt Vonnegut, jr., Cat’s Cradle
Freedom and equality require some capacities internal to the individual, and these the more removal of external barriers can never assure.
Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Enlightenment
Rich enough to buy another, poor enough to sell oneself
Rousseau
As Nietzsche himself observed, the flip side of an urge to dominate is an urge to submit and then to construe victimization as a claim to privilege.
National Review, 1992, p 25
668: the neighbor of the Beast
The test of anything in the Victorian mind was "does society approve?"
Pirsig
They conferred, as against the government, the right to be left alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men
Justice Brandeis
It is my belief that there are absolutes in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be absolute.
Justice Hugo Black
It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.
Lenin
Ethical values cannot be separated from biological facts
Potter, Bioethics
Whether a democracy addicted to excesses can reform itself
Richard Lamm
The general rule is that a democratic politician had better not be right too soon.
Walter Lipmann
Where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Tacitus.
Strange game, professor Falkan. The only winning move is not to play.
War Games
The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting.
David Nolan.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn's rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there, I did not die . . .
Mary Elizabeth Frye
I take a bottle of wine and I go drink it among the flowers.
We are allways three ... counting my shadow and my friend the shimmering moon
Happily the moon knows nothing of drinking, and my shadow is never thirsty
When I sing, the moon listens to me in silence. When I dance, my shadow dances too.
After all festivities the guests must depart. This sadness I do not know.
When I go home, the moon goes with me and my shadow follows me.
Li Po, The Little Fete
Quis hic locus? Quae regio? Quae mundis plaga? What world is this? What Kingdom? What shores of what worlds?
Lucius Annaeus Seneca Minor
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis ursae?
What place is this, what region, what quarter of the world? Where am I? Under the rising of the sun or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen bear?
Seneca, _Herucles Furens_ line 1138
Quoted in T.S. Eliot's "Marina"
It's what Hercules says when he comes to his senses after killing his wife & children. I've wondered how such lines made their way to Hollywood.
Probably through Eliot's "Marina," where Eliot quotes Seneca.
It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.
found on a tombstone
Biological man does not create his society any more than soil creates a tree....Biological man is exploited and devoured by social patterns that are essentially hostile to his biological values.
Robert Pirsig
Representative government in the United States represents money, not people, and therefore forfeited our allegiance and moral support.
Edward Abby
And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
Jeremiah 2:7
Bioethics - ethical values cannot be separated from biological facts.
Van Rensselaer Potter
If a builder build a house for some one and complete it, he shall give him a fee of two shekels in money for each sar of surface. If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If it kill the son of the owner the son of that builder shall be put to death. If it kill a slave of the owner, then he shall pay slave for slave to the owner of the house. If it ruin goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means. If a builder build a house for some one, even though he has not yet completed it; if then the walls seem toppling, the builder must make the walls solid from his own means.
First Building Code, Hammurabi, c. 1810 BCE – 1750 BCE
Thou knowest I am not wicked ... yet thou dost destroy me.
Job
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts -- for support rather than for illumination.
Andrew Lang (oft quoted as history for statistics)
The Invisible Foot
term coined by Milton Friedman
Everything not forbidden is compulsory.
T. H. White
The authority of a chief is permanently established by continuity of war.
Herbert Spencer
There are no phenomena which a society presents but what have there origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large.
Herbert Spencer
A large class of officiously humane people, can never see any social evil, but they propose to pass some law for its future prevention. It never strikes them that the misfortunes of one are lessons for thousands - that the world generally learns more by its mistakes than by its successes.
Herbert Spencer
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
Jack Hugh, Cato Institute
People smart enough to want to learn are smart enough to tune the selector button to the channel that has what they want.
Mary Ruwart
It is wrong to demand that the individual subordinate himself to the collectivity or merge in it, because it is by its most advanced individuals that the collectivity progresses and they can really advance only if they are free.... The individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement.
Sri Aurobindo, The Future Evolution of Man
The law, aspiring to the perfect housing abode, has accumulated so many good ideas that the only type of new building that is permitted must satisfy middl- class standards. A law that dictates either a model home or no home is probably fine for some, but what about those trying to provide housing for the poor?
Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense
We have invented a hybrid government form that achieves near perfect inertia. No one is in control. No one makes decisions. Only the massive weight of accumulated laws keeps everyone in check.
Philip K. Howard
Just as life preservers are not the preferred means of keeping passengers afloat, judicial review was not the preferred means of protecting the liberties of the people.
Randy E. Barnett
All the varied rights of man were threatened with submergence in a single right, that of belonging to a popular majority, or more accurately, of being represented by a legislative majority.
Randy E, Barnett
Law sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from no law at all.
Charles Murray
An essential element of lawfulness is law which is simple, objective and consistently applied.
Charles Murray
What is deadening to the soul is not to lose but to be forbidden to win.
Charles Murray
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested - Frank Rizzo
A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged - Tom Wolfe
Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges.
I don't have to show you any stinking badges!
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, film quote
When you look at the long an gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ben committed in the name of rebellion.
C. P. Snow "Either-Or"
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Poe
The astrological zodiac was not founded on the stars, but on symbolic motifs of our inner nature.
Aratos (3rd cent. BCE)
Little people are entitled to little justice.
Gerry Spence
God against man. Man against man. Man against woman. Man against nature. Very strange religion.
D. T. Suzuki, on Christianity
History is a long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
M.L King
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community what they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
Abraham Lincoln, 1854
If you don't know where you're going, slow down.
Herman E. Daley and John B. Cobb, Jr. For the Common Good
What has posterity ever done for me?
Kenneth Boulding
It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism
Generals always prepare for the last war
proverb, author unknown
How lucky it is for tyrants that one half of mankind doesn't think
and the other half doesn't feel.
J. G. Seume, quoted by Auden
The censorial power is in the people over government, not the government over the people.
James Madison
From each according to his ability, to each according to his work
Gorbachev
The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.
Gay Talese
Long experience has taught us that it is dangerous in the interest of truth to suppress opinions and ideas; it has further taught us that it is foolish to imagine that we can do so. It is far easier to meet an evil in the open and defeat it in fair combat in people's minds, than to drive it underground and have no hold on it or proper approach to it. Evil flourishes far more in the shadows than in the light of day.
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India, 1937
To live and work as bid by conscience
Political maturity of the people
Gorbachev phrases
There is no limit to the good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
General George C. Marshall
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still have other concerns to properly engage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it.
Thoreau
The censorial power is in the people over the government, not in the government over the people.
James Madison
From time to time it is necessary that pestilence, famine and war prune the luxuriant growth of the human race.
Aristotle
Tough Love
Garret Hardin
We do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be
Vercours, You Shall Know Them
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass:
A poor man shames us all
Gambra saying
We shall achieve justice in Athens when those who are not wronged are more
indignant than those who are.
Unknown Greek philosopher
aprender en cabeza ajena - Spanish saying, to learn in another's head
If we keep on learning at this rate well soon know nothing at all.
Mark Twain
Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong
Lord Acton
Freedom is the luxury of self-discipline
Lord Acton ???
The State has our instincts without our restraints
Will &Ariel Durant, Lessons of History
Government has been a giant pyramid scheme, a chain letter to the future
Richard Lamm
On the tablet of history we will have ti confess "It happened on our watch"
Richard Lamm
Hell is truth seen to late
John Locke
Immortality is one of the qualities we ascribe to people without having a sufficient understanding of their meaning. Other qualities of this kind are individuality, in the sense of an inner unity, a permanent and unchangeable I, consciousness and will. All these qualities can belong to man, but this certainly does not mean that they do belong to him, or belong to each and every one.
Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, p. 39
Man is not born with the finer bodies ... they can only be artificially cultivated in him provided favorable conditions but internal and external are present.
Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search, p. 41
What may be called the astral body is obtained by means of fusion, that is, by means of terribly hard inner work and struggle, Man is not born with it. And only very few men acquire an astral body. If it is formed it may continue to live after the death of the physical body, and it may be born again in another physical body. This is reincarnation. If it is not reborn, then in the course of time it also dies.
Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search, p. 32
One cannot "explain" pressure and stress themselves. one cannot get free of the actio in distans - one has lost the belief in being able to explain at all, and admits with a wry expression that description, and not explanation, is all that is possible, that the dynamic interpretation of the world, with its denial of "empty space" and its little clumps of atoms, will shortly come to dominate physics... . There is nothing for it, one is obliged to understand all motion, all "appearances," all "laws," only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man ass an analogy to this end.
Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1885
The mechanistic concept of motion is already a translation of the original process into the sign language of sight and touch.
The concept "atom," the distinction between the seat of a driving force and the frce itself, is a sign language derived from our logical-psychical world.
Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1888
The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as "moved") - so as to be calculable - thus causal entities are invented ... . If we eliminate these additions, no things remain, but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their effect upon the same.
Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1888
Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.
George Washington, letter, Oct. 31, 1786
A man of truth must also be a man of care
Gandhi
I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin
Gandhi
We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party
Gandhi
A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution.
Gandhi
Character building is the proper foundation of education
Gandhi
It is my rule as a Satyagrahi to understand the viewpoint of the party I propose to deal with,
and to try to agree with him as far as may be possible.
Gandhi
It is my duty to place before the people all the legitimate remedies for grievances. A nation that wants to come into its own ought to know all the ways and means to freedom... . Satyagraha is a sovereign remedy.
Gandhi
When the symbol is made into a fetish and an instrument of proving the superiority of one's religion over others, it is fit only to be discarded.
Gandhi
It is an inalienable right of the people to withhold cooperation.
Gandhi
Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics does not know what religion means.
Gandhi
No rules can tell us how this disobedience may be done, and by whom, when and where, nor can they tell us which laws foster untruth. It is only experience that can guide us.
Gandhi
I see dead people
walking around like regular people
they don't see each other
they only see what they want to see
they don't know they're dead
The Sixth Sense
I see dumb people
walking around like regular people
they don't see each other
they only see what they want to see
they don't know they're dumb
anon
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac
A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested
Georgios Seferis, via Maria
Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need.
Jeff Kallman
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.
Aristotle
Evolution is recklessly opportunistic
Ernst Mayer
One could almost define life as the organized disobedience to the law of gravity.
Pirsig
Wilderness was just a scenic consideration, just a decoration at the edges of the human world.
Dave Foreman
Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots!
Giulio Giorello, Italian philosopher
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Jack Handey
OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan
Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.
William James
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
Vaclav Havel
Making a living is not the same thing as making a life.
Maya Angelou
Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.
Fielding
Sanctified afflictions are spirititual promotions.
Matthew Henry
Anybody can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
Aristotle
A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Shakespeare
Greatness of soul is shown as well by what is attempted as by what is achieved.
C. Nestell Bovee
In the power of fixing the attention lies the most precious of the intellectual habits.
Robert Hall
Well begun is half done.
Horace
Carpe Diem.
Horace
The world has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Caution, though very often wasted, is a good risk to take.
H.W. Shaw
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
If we don't change our direction we'll end up where we're headed.
Chinese Proverb
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand how hard it is to change others.
Arnold Glasow
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Gandhi
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks out upon the world, yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good, yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.
St. Theresa
To me it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Emerson
Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
FDR
Are you out to win an argument or an agreement?
Jim Lytle
A conservative is a man who does not think that anything should be done for the first time.
Alfred E. Wiggam
Conservatives are not ncessarily stupid people, but most stupid people are conservative.
J.S. Mill
Formula for contentment: just think how happy you would be if you lost everything you had right now - and then got it back again.
Frances Rodman
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individualty of his rowing.
Emerson
True contentment is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.
A. Jay
In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
John Ray (1627-1705)
To escape criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
The trouble with most people is that that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.
Walter Duranty
First deserve, then desire.
Proverb
Enthusiasm- etym. en theos, possessed by a god
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)
There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.
Emerson
Experience is the name people give to their mistakes.
Jewish proverb
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Theodore Hesburgh
He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
Horace
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where other men see none.
William James
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
G.B. Shaw
God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.
Gandhi
Everone desires long life, not one old age.
Johnathan Swift
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
John Milton
A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace.
James Hamilton
Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we think up to hide them.
La Rouchefoucauld
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
O.W. Holmes
It is not enough to aim - you must hit.
Italian proverb
How many joys are crushed because people look up at the sky and disregard what is at their feet.
Goethe's mother
Justice: a decision in your favor.
Harry Kaufman
He who laughs, lasts.
Mary Pettibone Poole
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.
Conservatism, distrust of the people tempered be fear.
Gladstone
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
George Orwell
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
Evan Esar
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.
Wilson Mizner
Men do not trip on mountains, they trip on small stones.
Chinese
Luck - where preparation meets opportunity.
Earl Nightengale
The harder you work the luckier you get.
Gary Player
Learn from the mistakes of others- you can't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Martin Vanbee
Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think and thinking where we ought to feel.
J. Collins
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.
Henry Ford
An optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it is.
Robert J. Oppenheimer
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
Reginald Mansell
We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Talmud QBLH
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
Elbert Hubbard
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Thomas La Mance
People are not afraid of death per se, but of the incompleteness of their lives.
Lisel Marburg Goodman
There has been a lot of progress during my lifetime, but I'm afraid it's heading in the wrong direction.
Ogden Nash
In leaving nothing to chance you will do few things wrong. You will also do few things.
???
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
Johnathan Swift
People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.
John Wanamaker
True repentance is to cease from sin.
St. Ambrose
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Andrew Gide
Nothing splendid was ever achieved except by those who dared to believe that something within them was superior to circumstances.
Bruce Barton
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Eric Hoffer
Rabbi Zusya said that on the day of judgment God would ask him not why he had not been Moses but why he had not been Zusya.
Rabbi Zusya
If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.
Proverb quoted by Sam Levinson
The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.
Ingersoll
It is a pleasure to have someone to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
Balzac
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
William James
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Nietzsche
The cost of a thing is that amount of life which must be exchanged for it.
Thoreau
Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.
David Starr Jordan
Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
Wordsworth
These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people; they call a spade a spade.
Plutarch
On the endless path in God
Don't stay in any of the stations,
Don't stay in any station you have won--
Go on! Go on! Desire more and more!
The person who has dropsy can never have enough water.
The Divine Courtyard is an infinite plane;
Leave behind you the place of honor.
What is the real place of honor? The path itself.
Rumi
No one can ascend onto a higher step until he places another man in his own place. What a man received he must immediately give back; only then can he receive more. Otherwise from him will be taken even what he has already been given.
G. I. Gurdjieff
"More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly." --
Woody Allen, Side Effects
There was once a Wise Sage who wandered the countryside. One day, as he passed near a village, he was approached by a woman who saw he was a Sage, and told him of a sick child nearby. She beseeched him to help this child, as he may. The Sage came to the village, and a crowd gathered around him, for such a man was a rare sight. One woman brought the sick child to him, and he
said a prayer over her.
"Do you really think your prayer will help her, when medicine has failed?" yelled a man from the crowd.
"You know nothing of such things! You are a stupid fool!" said the Sage to the man.
The man became very angry with these words, and his face grew hot and red. He was about to say something, or perhaps strike out at him, when the Sage walked over to him and said: "If one word has such power as to make you so angry and hot, may not another
have the power to heal?" And thus, the Sage healed two people that day.
Unknown
If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.
Arthur C. Clarke
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb till your life has illustrated it. --
John Keats
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
Charles Evans Hughes
There in the water
Color of water moves
fishes...
Raizan
The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born. They also believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery. At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end.
A. Whitney Brown, "The Big Picture"
Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.
Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)
I know not, sir whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
J.M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)
We realize too late that we never taught our students what ducks know without knowing, that "we must love life before loving its meaning," as Dostoyevsky told us. We must love life, and some meaning may grow from that love. A marsh at nightfall is life loving itself. Nothing more. But nothing less, either, and we should not be fooled into thinking this is a small thing.
Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast
Political and social institutions of all kinds, as viewed by Chuang Tzu, serve only to impose suffering on man. This is because the natures of different things are not identical, and each individual has its own special likings. Hence, they neither need be, nor should they be, forcibly made identical. Since things are thus different, it is right that they should remain different. In this way uniformity is made out of difference. All political and social institutions, however, decide upon a single Good as a standard for conduct, and make all men follow this standard. This is to constrain difference to a forced uniformity, in which case what is intended to help people results only in harming them.
Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
Alan Dean Foster, "To the Vanishing Point"
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), 'Out of My Later Years,' 1950
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt
Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)
Black drinks the sun and draws all colours to it.
Robert Graves
Remember the generational battles twenty years ago? Remember all the screaming at the dinner table about haircuts, getting jobs and the American dream? Well, our parents won. They're out living the American dream on some damned golf course in Vero Beach, and we're stuck with the jobs and haircuts.
P. J. O'Rourke
If we had less statemanship we could get along with fewer battleships.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
Sally Kempton
on the twelfth floor
a life's work holds open
the book-reviewer's door
Martin Burke
I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948),
when asked what he thought of Western civilization
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. "If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.
J.W.N. Sullivan
There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
Walt Kelly
The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert
Suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
General Colin Powell
Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?
Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD)
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.
Carl G. Jung, intro to Frances G. Wickes' "Analysis der
Kinderseele" (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman (1907 - 1984)
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), "On Liberty", 1859
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Aldo Leopold
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
SNL ???
The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.
Alexander Jablokov, The Place of No Shadows
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
W. B. Yeats
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them to see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A. A. Milne
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)å
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design abuilding, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, giveorders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes. Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings-- they are so trite, so threadbare. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot be far wrong. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through fire.
Norman Douglas
When you determined what you want, you have made the most important decision of your life. You have to know what you want in order to attain it.
Douglas Lurtan
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)
Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practise charity.
Albert Camus, The Fall
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Christopher Darlington Morley
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (But who will guard the guards?)
Juvenal
There was a young woman named Jenny,
Whose limericks weren't worth a penny.
Her rhythm and rhyme
Were perfectly fine
But whenever she tried to write any,
She always had one line too many.
Anonymous
There once was a man from Dundoo
Whose limericks stopped at line two.
Anonymous
Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse.
Billy Connolly on ABC's "Head Of the Class"
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James (1842 - 1910)
The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given "disease." The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.
Dr. Thomas Arnold Mindell
One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.
Dan Quayle, 12/6/89
To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.
Alan Paton
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
David Hume (1711 - 1776)
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
Daniel Boorstin
After several minutes of utterly dull conversation I began to think of her not as a woman but as a human, then not as a human but as an animal, then not as an animal but as a source of high-grade protein.
Mark Gooley
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O'Rourke
Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations
[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.
Dan Quayle
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
Richard Feynman
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G. H. Hardy
I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.
Katherine Anne Porter, 1989
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950), Letters, 1952
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabbinical Saying
Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
Edward Everett Hale
I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
Herbert Bayard Swope
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Saki
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)
It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger than the previous record.
John Blasik
God does not play dice with the universe; he plays an ineffible game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
Gaiman and Pratchett's "Good Omens"
In Biblical times, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Just like today.
Abigail Van Buren
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
Edward Abbey
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
Moses Hadas (1900 - 1966)
Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, "Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin."
Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy
Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.
Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987)
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I. Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed.
Senator Homer T. Bone
It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times.
Thomas Brackett Reed
A well cultivated mind is made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only the one single mind educated by all previous time.
Fontenelle
It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.
Author Unknown
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the full value of time and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
Rambler
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer
I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by a dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in a magnificient glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London, Personal Credo
Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, 'A Woman of Independent Means'
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1809 - 1894)
That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Arthur Koestler
Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
Ralph Nader
To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.
Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.
Charles Peguy
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.
Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson (1911 - 1980)
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
Justice William O. Douglas
Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.
Dan Quayle, 5/22/89
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
Hermann Hesse
Models are to be used, not believed.
H. Theil `Principles of Econometrics'
Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. "Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck?".
"Of course not," Bohr replied, "but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not."
Neils Bohr
Etymology, n.: Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations that were hard for the public to believe. The term "etymology" was formed from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"), and "logy" ("study of"). It meant "the study of things that are hard to swallow."
Mike Kellen
Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
Tom Robbins
Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.
Ron Nesen
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman
Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.
Unknown
A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice.
Bill Cosby
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
General Colin Powell
I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Stay away from needle drugs. Richard Nixon is the only dope worth shooting.
Abbie Hoffman
You teach best what you most need to learn.
Richard Bach
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)
Daniel Dennett, from Consciousness Explained
Penicillin was indeed the product of accidental discovery, but the discovery was made, and the knowledge developed, because certain scientists had definite goals in mind. "Chance," Pastuer wrote, "favors only the prepared mind." The mind must be prepared not only by scientific training and technological know-how, but also by the awareness of social needs.
Saturday Review
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
Storm Jameson
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
Doctor Who
Not even the gods fight against necessity.
The Seven Sages (650 BC - 550 BC), from Diogenes
Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.
Jules Feiffer
Pluralitas non ponenda est sine necessitate
Occam, alternate phrasing
Necessity knows no law.
Publilius Syrus
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Doctor Who
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
He who would rise in the world should veil his ambition with the forms of humanity.
Chinese Proverb
The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor.
Benjamin Franklin
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1890
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the