Favorite Quotes
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Familiar Quotations
"A book of quotations ... can never be complete."
--Robert M. Hamilton
"For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change."
--Ingrid Bengis
"Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it."
--Christopher Morley
"Life is complex. It has real and imaginary components."
--Tom Potter
"Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends."
--Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
"Suicide is an extreme vote of no confidence in a society that doesn't work."
--Sharif Abdullah
"The moment you confess you are thinking of suicide, you become an enemy to the illusions of peace of mind that others cling to desperately."
--Al Giordano, narconews@gmail.com
"Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?"
--Tolstoy, Confession
"Dave lay in the darkness and thought about life. He had learned early on that he would never truly understand anything. The best he could hope for was a working misunderstanding. Through careful refinement, a working misunderstanding might actually lead to successful predictions. This, as he understood it, was called science."
--from Slam, by Lewis Shiner, p. 160
"One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again."
--Alvin Toffler, foreword to Order out of Chaos
"We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and.'"
--A. S. Eddington
"Almost everything comes from almost nothing."
--Henri-Frédéric Amiel
"Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled."
--Ted Nelson
A specialist is someone who learns more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. A generalist is someone who learns less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.
--paraphrase; from E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series?
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."
--T. H. Huxley
"Alternative models are neither right nor wrong, just more or less useful in allowing us to operate in the world and discover more and better options for solving problems."
--Andrew Weil, 1986 preface to The Natural Mind
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
--George Box
"We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom."
--Montaigne
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T. S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934
Love tells me I am everything.
Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
And between the two my life flows.
--Sri Nisargadatta
"We think in generalities, but we live in detail."
--Alfred North Whitehead
"Learn as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow."
--MohandasGandhi
"The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work."
--Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Chapter 1 "Why We Must Disestablish School"
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
--William James
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
--Albert Einstein
"It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold."
--Peter Singer, "Practical Ethics"
"A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one."
--Benjamin Franklin
"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
--Eric Hoffer or Al Roger ?!
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
--Proust
"The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."
--Vannevar Bush (~1940)
"The common sand that you tread underfoot, let it be cast into the furnace to boil and melt and it will become a crystal as splendid as that through which Galileo and Newton discovered the stars."
--from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
[...and he never knew the silicon chip?]
"I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel."
--Galileo, 1612, upon seeing moons orbiting Jupiter through a telescope
"I was wrong. This changes everything."
--Maynard James Keenan
"Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior."
--B. F. Skinner
"If a fool persists in his folly he shall become wise."
--William Blake
"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." --William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
"We're not punished for our sins, but by them."
--Elbert Hubbard
"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
--Marshall Mcluhan
"In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning."
--H. A. Kramers
"The map is not the territory."
--Alfred Korzbyski (or Eric Bell?)
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
--on Richard Feynman's office chalkboard when he died
"To let understanding stop at what can be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven."
--Chuang Tse XXIII
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
--Albert Einstein
"There is
A madman inside of you
Who is always running for office"
--Hafiz
"The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan."
--Arthur Koestler, Darkness At Noon
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
--Albert Einstein
"Never express yourself more clearly than you think."
--Niels Bohr
"What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"
--Ward Cunningham
"You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described."
--Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach
"All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem -- all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that 'To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.'"
--Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach
"How can you expect me to be perfect...when I am full of contradictions?"
--Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra
"Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution."
--Edward Teller
"One paradox is better than none; it gives you a chance at having a deep truth."
--JohnAbbe
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
--Will Rogers
"Don't just do something, be there."
--Buddha
A man, after listening to Buddha speak a number of times, pointed out that he sometimes said things that apparently contradicted something he had said earlier. Buddha acknowledged this and explained that some are off the path (dharma) to the right, so he tells them, "Go left, go left!" Others are off the path to the left, so he tells them "Go right, go right!"
"The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth."
--Niels Bohr
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The part is greater than its role in the whole."
--Tom Atlee
"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful."
--Aldous Huxley
"We're never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy."
--Seal, "Crazy"
"Tell me if I disturb you," he asked as he entered, "and I'll leave right away." "You don't only disturb," she answered, "you shake my whole existence. Welcome!"
--Bo Setterlind, Swedish Poet
"We're all Jesus, Buddha, and the Wizard of Oz"
--XTC, in "Merely a Man," on Oranges & Lemons
"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
--Tennyson, "In Memoriam"
"Groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having."
--John Perry Barlow, "Cynthia Horner's Eulogy", April 1994
"Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out."
--Vaclav Havel
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Trust each other again and again. When the trust level gets high enough, people transcend apparent limits, discovering new and awesome abilities of which they were previously unaware."
--David Armistead
"Trust is the bandwidth of human communications"
--Karl Erik Sveiby
(information + aggregation) / trust = relationships
--Jeff Jarvis, conclusion of talk
"Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation."
--Elton Trueblood
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n"
--John Milton
"Our lives are what our thoughts make of it."
--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 A.D.)
"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
--Henry Ford
"Express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it."
--Ralph Marston
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
"The only way to learn about some edges is to go beyond them."
--Anonymous
"There's an old saying: 'He who plays with fire sometimes throws light on the situation.'"
--Perry Mason
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
--Albert Einstein
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
--Albert Einstein, "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,'" for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
"If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now, put the foundations under them."
--Henry David Thoreau
"Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself."
--André Gide
"Nothing is sacred. And, more importantly...the 'nothing' you end up with is truly sacred."
--Douglas Rushkoff
That Which You Are Seeking Is Causing You To Seek
--Buddhist book title, by Cheri Huber
"In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn."
--Albert Schweitzer
"Of the forces which are imperceptible forces, none is greater than that of change...all things are ever in the state of change ... therefore the I of the past is no longer the I of today."
--3rd century, Chang-tzû commentary
"Change is not merely necessary to life -- IT IS LIFE"
--Alvin Toffler
"If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
--Giuseppe di Lamedosa
"Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed."
--Irene Peter
"History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
--Mark Twain
"Things never change the same."
--Alice Hoeltke
"It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be."
--James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
--Tolstoy
"A man said to the universe,
'Sir, I exist!'
'However,' replied the universe, 'the fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.'
--Stephen Crane
"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
--unknown
"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 waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."
--Walt Kelly, later frequently "We have met the enemy, and he is us." from Kelly's character Pogo
"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."
--John Wayne
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
--Robert Louis Stephenson
"It's all very well...to realize the evil you must fight, are trying to fight, is embodied in your image in the mirror, someone with your very name, your doppelganger walking down the street toward you, your long lost brother sister father mother, but the real life stinger is finding out that the good you must embrace is walking around living in someone who has the other kind of earlobes, feels the other way about anchovies, wakes up with the other amount of energy in the morning, and will probably never read your favorite book." --Anne Herbert
[Thinkpeace cartoon of many people each thinking, 'but what can one person do?']
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
--Jack London
"Whatever you can do
or dream you can
begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now."
--Goethe
"The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail."
--Ramakrishna
"Leap and the net will appear."
--Zen saying
"The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable."
--Paul Tillich
"Try not. Do, or do not.
There is no try."
--Yoda
"Trying is the internalization of the failure of omnipotence."
--Brian O'Shaugnessy
"Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss."
--Douglas Adams
"When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible."
--Rule 12, Art of Unix http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
"My power to make a difference is directly proportional to my equanimity with things as they are, and the love, truth & beauty in my visions of how things could be."
--JohnAbbe
"Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out."
--Randall Monroe, "Choices", http://xkcd.com/267/
"Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth."
--William Purkey
If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing.
--From Zimbabwe(?)
"The best way to predict your future is to create it."
--Peter Drucker
"I think I am a verb."
--R. Buckminster Fuller
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the longer run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
--Helen Keller
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away."
--anonymous
"The proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity...(it is) the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne."
--Brian Swimme, Canticle to the Cosmos
"If any of you ... have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well."
--John Jay Chapman, 1900 Hobart College commencement address
"A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble."
--MohandasGandhi
"Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it."
--Pericles of Athens, circa 430 B.C.E.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
--John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
--George Washington
"The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self-consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs. ... You're safe because you have an ironic distance from the coercive techniques I'm employing. All of them that is, except this one. Are you on your guard yet? Does it feel good? Of course not."
--Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion
"It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power."
--Mary Parker Follett, 1933 papers presented to the London School of Economics
"I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people."
--Ursula K. Leguin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address, Mills College 1983
"I had never thought of democracy as a daily practice."
--Steve Brigham, on the Great Peace March
"Peace is conflict done well."
--Brandon WilliamsCraig
"War is conflict done poorly."
"Debate is war by other means."
--JohnAbbe
"The deliberative sense of the community should govern."
--Alexander Hamilton
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
--Abraham Lincoln
"Powerlessness corrupts. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely."
--Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Our Deepest Fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our Deepest Fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you NOT to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
--Marianne Williamson
"If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own."
--Wes Nisker
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
--A. J. Liebling
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
--Dom Helder Camara
"Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that make philanthropy necessary."
--MartinLutherKingJr
"Money is like muck, not good except it be spread."
--Francis Bacon
"Money is a concretization of a broken model of value."
--JohnAbbe
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem"
--John Paul Getty
"An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."
--St. Augustine
"I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin."
--Malcolm X
"The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains."
--Paul Simon
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence."
--MohandasGandhi
"A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace."
--Gersonides
"It is more important to root out the violence latent in the structure of society than to make peace when open violence breaks out."
--Jayaprakash Narayan, introduction to Vinoba's Third Power
"The quest to abandon illusions about our condition is also a quest to abandon conditions which support illusions."
--Anonymous
bumper stickers (quote better...):
Abandon the illusions which support our conditions.
Abandon the conditions which support our illusions.
"We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic 'temperature' are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet 'as a whole.'"
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, 1950
"We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial."
--Christopher Alexander, 1964
"Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake and set up our computers among the wild apple trees."
--Tom Robbins, Life magazine, December 1988: "Why are we here?"
"To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer,"
--Bill Vaughan
"The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind."
--Albert Einstein
"The central law of all wholesome life is reciprocity, mutuality. … [But] the group is valuable only as it permits personalities, not automatons, to emerge."
--Norman Thomas
Bruce: How do you make somebody love you without affecting free will?
God: Welcome to my world.
--Bruce Almighty (film)
"There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most."
--May Sarton
"The universe is gratis. It cannot be earned, nor need it be earned."
--Brother David Steindl-Rast
"Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation's ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that's true love."
--Julia Butterfly Hill
"A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to. And any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong and foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has the vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well, sustain life."
--Emma Goldman
"The (Father's) kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine and looked for the one until he found it. After he had toiled, he said to the sheep, 'I love you more than the ninety-nine.'"
--Jesus Christ
"If there’s one thing I know it’s God does love a good joke."
--Hugh Elliott
"Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else..."
--Mikhail Bakunin
"Healing the universe is an inside job"
--Thomas, in the movie Mindwalk
"The human person is the sum total of [a] 15 billion year [chain] of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself"
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 194?
"I look for what needs to be done...after all, that's how the universe designs itself."
--R. Buckminster Fuller
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
--Howard Thurman
"Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes from the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
Humans...God's attempt to pass the Turing test.
"Those who will not reason
Perish in the act.
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason."
--W. H. Auden, Shorts
"The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The difference between theory and practice is bigger in theory than in practice"
--unknown
"There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
--Kurt Lewin
*
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best!"
--Frank Zappa, Joe's Garage
Everyone Deserves Music
--Michael Franti (song title)
[Music--fill this space where a quote could have been with music that inspires you or leads you to reflect]
"Only connect."
--E. M. Forster
"Eventually, everything connects."
--Charles Eames
"Show up & choose to be present, pay attention to what has heart and meaning, tell the truth without blame or judgment, and be open rather than attached to the outcome."
--Angeles Arrien
"Behind our every action, behind every reaction, emotion, thought and word -- is a positive motive."
--JohnAbbe
"When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans."
--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 A.D.)
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it.
I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against.
I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
--Malcolm X
"Before we can forgive one another we have to understand one another. What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen."
--Henry David Thoreau
"Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
--Philip Pullman
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
--Muriel Rukeyser
"Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one."
--Brenda Ueland, "Tell Me More" [Listen to yourself, too]
[as excerpted in Utne Reader Nov/Dec 1992, from p. 109 of Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings, Brenda Ueland, '92, Holy Cow! Press (Box 3170, Mt. Royal Station, Duluth, MN 55803 USA 218-724-1653))]
"Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, (hu)mankind will have discovered fire."
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"My mother, Aanaa Aanawwii, told me that, the easiest ice to be melted is the ice on the ground, but the very hardest ice to be melted is the one in the heart of man. Unless the ice in the heart of man is melted, she told me, man will have a hard time to change, and begin using his incredibly vast knowledge wisely."
--Angaangaq Lyberth
"It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: The heart cannot actually break, it can only break open ... To live with a broken-open heart is to experience life full strength ... When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world. It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than the conventional kind based on hope and expectation. Only in this fearless love that can respond to life's pain as well as its beauty can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age. The broken-hearted warrior is an essential archetype for our time."
--John Welwood, Love and Awakening
"The challenge is in being compassionate toward those who are, at this moment, not being compassionate. For some of us, this is especially true when it's oneself!"
--JohnAbbe
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world."
--Frederick Douglass
"Things undreamt of are daily being seen, the impossible is ever becoming possible. We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence."
--MohandasGandhi
"Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms."
--J. Krishnamurti
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother (or father or caretaker) and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love."
--Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure (citing work by Edward Tronick and Katherine Weinberg)
"We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them."
--Larry Wall, second State of the Onion speech http://kiev.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html
"Instead of attacking people for their views, attack, rather, their views for them."
--Herbert Brün
"We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right."
--MohandasGandhi
"In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations ... If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa ... the independence movement in India ...) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world."
--Walter Wink
"Here's what i think. I think we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do, by what we deny ourselves, by what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include."
--Pere Henri, in the movie Chocolat
"All the world is my homeland
All its people my kinsfolk"
--Tamil couplet from Purananuru, 2nd century B.C.
I want to live in a house by the side of the road
Where the race of Man goes by;
The ones who are good,
The ones who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not take the scorner's seat,
Nor hurl the cynics bann;
I want to live in a house by the side of the road,
And be a friend to Man.
--Sam Walter Foss
*
"If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think we might see each other once or twice?"
--Jonathan to Sullivan in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach
"A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit."
--Elton Trueblood
"To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence -- this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1786-1830), bk. VII, ch. 5; from Bartlett's]
"A company is known by the people it keeps."
--Anonymous
(also see CorporatePersonhood)
"When [networks] get uncomfortable, it's easy to opt out of them. Communities teach tolerance, co-existence, and mutual respect.... I fear that calling a network a community leads people to complacency and delusion, to accepting an inadequate substitute because they've never experienced the real thing and they don't know what they're missing."
--Eric Utne, publisher, Utne Reader, March-April 1995, p. 3
"My dear Amanda," intoned the family lawyer, "it has come to my attention that you are increasingly seen in the company of extremely weird individuals."
Brushing a cigar ash from the attorney's somber necktie, Amanda corrected him. "There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others."
--from Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins
He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
--Edwin Markham (1852-1940)
[from Thoughts Of The Great, p. 13, compiled by Marion Parker, Philosophical Library, Inc., New York, 1960]
"Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home."
--Ursula K. Le Guin, in Always Coming Home
"People are divided into two groups -- the righteous and the unrighteous -- and the righteous do the dividing."
--Lord Cohen
"If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together."
--Lila Watson (aboriginal activist)
"The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without."
--S. J. Gould
"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork."
--Thomas Merton
[and others: fighting, blame]
"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern lives are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
--Thomas Merton
"To fall in love with yourself is the first secret of happiness. Then if you're not a good mixer you can always fall back on your own company."
--Robert Morley
"I may not be much. But I'm all I think about."
--Dave Miller (Kit's husband)
Recursion: If you get the point, stop. Otherwise, see Recursion.
Infinite recursion: See Infinite recursion.
"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."
--Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
"If your hand goes forth, withhold your temper. If your temper goes forth, withhold your hand."
--samurai saying
"What you do speaks so loudly to me that I cannot hear what you say."
--old Quaker saying
If you do not want to learn, then do not ask questions, especially not of yourself.
"Those who can, do.
Those who think others can too, teach."
--Derek Peterson
Oh no, not another learning experience!
--unknown
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--Philip K. Dick
"Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend."
--Rabindranath Tagore
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence."
--Mohandas Gandhi
"In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers."
--Andre Malraux
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
--Thomas Pynchon
"I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody's answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears."
--Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
"I know I have not found the answers to all of my questions. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways I am as confused as ever, but I believe that I am confused on a higher level and about more important things."
--unknown
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
--Rudyard Kipling
All things in the Universe
Have a language.
It is not they who must learn to speak,
It is we who must learn to listen.
--Aliyah Shanti, Olympia Meeting
"If you love it enough, anything will talk with you."
--George Washington Carver
"We'll form an association with a volleyball if we have to."
--David Weinberger, preface to SmallPiecesLooselyJoined
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."
--Mark Twain
"This letter is a very long one, because I lacked the time to make it shorter."
--Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, 1657
(but see http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/2003/07/msg00105.html )
"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site."
--Frank Lloyd Wright
"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
--Miss Susan, in Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time
"Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God."
--Socrates, in the Apology
"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."
--Truman Capote
"Rather, she [ Death ] simply is the Ultimate Hostess who tells you when your table's ready. It's up to other powers what section you're seated in (smoking or non-smoking)."
--John C. Straffin
"Ella, Ella, Ella... Never knock on Death's door. Ring the bell and run away! Death *really* hates that."
--Doctor, Doctor
"The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either."
--Porkypine (in Walt Kelly's Pogo)
vi ses nästa gång
--Swedish for, "see you next time"