Wikiquote:Quote of the day/June 2011


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June 1
 

With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents.

~ Carl von Clausewitz ~

 


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June 2
 

Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong.

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

~ John Godfrey Saxe ~

 


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June 3
 


Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

~ Sydney Smith ~

 


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June 4
 

Be aware of wonder. And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word of all — LOOK.

~ Robert Fulghum ~

 


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June 5
 
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10000 years ago.

~ John Maynard Keynes ~

 


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June 6

 

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

~ Thomas Mann ~

 


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June 7

 

A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.

~ Paul Gauguin ~

 


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June 8

 

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

~ Scott Adams ~

 


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June 9
 

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.

~ Cole Porter ~

 


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June 10
 

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol.

~ Maurice Sendak ~

 


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June 11
  Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.

~ Ben Jonson ~

 


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June 12
 

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

~ Djuna Barnes ~

 


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June 13
 

All hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

~ William Butler Yeats ~

 


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June 14
 

In moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response to moral stimuli; but for them to retain their effect requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new priority of values.

~ Che Guevara ~

 


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June 15
 

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the crudest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

~ Erik Erikson ~

 


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June 16
 

The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

~ James Joyce ~
in
Ulysses

 


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June 17

 

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware my power...
Green Lantern's light!

~ Green Lantern ~

 


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June 18
 

Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.

~ Napoleon I of France ~

 


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June 19
 

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

~ Salman Rushdie ~

 


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June 20

 

Ole Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise,
If we didn't fire our muskets 'til we looked 'em in the eyes.
We held our fire 'til we seed their faces well,
Then we opened up our squirrel guns an' really gave 'em ...well!

Yeah, they ran through the briars an' they ran through the brambles
An' they ran through the bushes where the rabbits couldn't go.
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

~ Jimmy Driftwood ~

 


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June 21
 

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr ~

 


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June 22
 


That government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

~ Wilhelm von Humboldt ~

 


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June 23
 

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

~ Anna Akhmatova ~

 


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June 24
 

A thousand graces diffusing
He passed through the groves in haste,
And merely regarding them
As He passed
Clothed them with His beauty.

~ John of the Cross ~
Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom (1577–1585)

 


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June 25
 

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

~ George Orwell ~
"Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)

 


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June 26
 

All of us, without being taught, have attained to a belief in some sort of divinity, though it is not easy for all men to know the precise truth about it, nor is it possible for those who do know it to tell it to all men.
~ Julian ~
Against the Galilaeans (c. 362)

 


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June 27
 

The lunatics end up in charge of everything. Sane, normal people don't need power trips.

~ James P. Hogan ~
Paths to Otherwhere (1996)

 


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June 28
 

Think not the bigotry of another is any excuse for your own.

~ John Wesley ~

 


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June 29
 

The heart of God through his creation stirs,
We thrill to feel it, trembling as the flowers
That die to live again, — his messengers,
To keep faith firm in these sad souls of ours.

The waves of Time may devastate our lives,
The frosts of age may check our failing breath,
They shall not touch the spirit that survives
Triumphant over doubt and pain and death.

~ Celia Thaxter ~

 


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June 30
 

And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical,
Newtonian? A frozen prison?
Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation
Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend
I know. I don't know, and if I did,
Still my imagination is a thousand years old.

~ Czesław Miłosz ~

 


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Today is Thursday, March 28, 2024; it is now 20:14 (UTC)