Wikiquote:Quote of the day/July 2011

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July 1

The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.

~ George Sand ~

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July 2

Every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

~ Hermann Hesse ~

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July 3

You can only be young once but you can be immature forever.

~ Dave Barry ~

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July 4

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

~ Thomas Jefferson ~
in the
US Declaration of Independence

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July 5

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

~ Jean Cocteau ~

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July 6

We need a little more compassion, and if we cannot have it then no politician or even a magician can save the planet.

~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama ~

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July 7

Any social organization does well enough if it isn't rigid. The framework doesn't matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.

~ Robert A. Heinlein ~
in
Glory Road

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July 8

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross ~

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July 9

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

~ William Jennings Bryan ~

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July 10

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

~ Marcel Proust ~

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July 11

"In God We Trust." … It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased: it always sounds well — In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. And in a measure it is true — half the nation trusts in Him. That half has decided it.

~ Mark Twain ~

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July 12

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

~ Buckminster Fuller ~

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July 13

Men willingly believe what they wish.

~ Julius Caesar ~

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July 14

I have been an anarchist all my life. I hope I have remained one. I should consider it very sad indeed had I to turn to a General and rule men with a military rod. They have come to me voluntarily, they are ready to stake their lives in our antifascist fight. I believe, as I always have, in freedom. The freedom which rests on the sense of responsibility. I consider discipline indispensable, but it must be inner discipline, motivated by a common purpose and a strong feeling of comradeship.

~ Buenaventura Durruti ~

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July 15

It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it.

~ J. K. Rowling ~
in
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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July 16

What I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.

~ J. D. Salinger ~
in
The Catcher in the Rye

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July 17

Never give up! it is wiser and better
Always to hope, than once to despair.

~ Martin Farquhar Tupper ~

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July 18

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

~ Nelson Mandela ~

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July 19

It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary.

~ Edgar Degas ~

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July 20

Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.

~ Petrarch ~

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July 21

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

~ Ernest Hemingway ~

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July 22

Do not disturb my circles!

~ Archimedes ~

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July 23

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.

~ Anthony Kennedy ~

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July 24

God give us men. The time demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty and in private thinking.

~ Josiah Gilbert Holland ~

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July 25

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hunger, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.

~ Eric Hoffer ~

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July 26

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

~ George Bernard Shaw ~

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July 27

I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

~ Hilaire Belloc ~

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July 28

The World is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with the warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins ~

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July 29

Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. A mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld ~

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July 30

I love the whirling of the dervishes.
I love the beauty of rare innocence.
You don't need no crystal ball,
Don't fall for a magic wand.
We humans got it all,
We perform the miracles.

~ Kate Bush ~

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July 31

The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

~ J. K. Rowling ~

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QOTD by month + Suggestions for: January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December

Today is Thursday, June 20, 2013; it is now 06:16 (UTC)

Last modified on 28 June 2011, at 00:08

Wikiquote:Quote of the day/July 2011

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