Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other. ~ P. L. Travers
2005
The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape. ~ Bono (born 10 May 1960)
2006
The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise. ~ Karl Barth (born 10 May 1886)
2007
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. ~ Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, (d. 10 May 1696)
2008
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other... one.

~ Bono ~ (Born 10 May 1960)
2009
Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story. ~ John Crowley
2010

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Reach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case
What you don't have you don't need it
What you don't know you can feel it somehow

~ Bono ~

2011
I do not preach universal salvation, what I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment. ~ Karl Barth
2012
The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, … I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it.
~ Donovan ~
2013
It seemed — in 1968 — the possibilities of peace and brotherhood could be realised that very year. We're still working on it.
~ Donovan ~
2014
Our Yes towards life from the very beginning carries within it the Divine No which breaks forth from the antithesis and points away from what now was the thesis to the original and final synthesis. The No is not the last and highest truth, but the call from home which comes in answer to our asking for God in the world.
~ Karl Barth ~
2015
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
~ Abraham Lincoln ~
2016
We are magic. It is magic that we're walking around. It's fantastic magic. Some people would call it miracles; I like to call it magic. … I'm very aware of this. Yes, the more aware I get, the more I can understand how big it is, how big it will get. It'll be harder to comprehend; that's why I have to go along with it, 'cause its so vast. To say to somebody that God is everything that lives and ever has lived and ever will live, and you're never going to touch and see, smell and be everything that is God. Magic is very hard to comprehend.
~ Donovan ~
2017
The productions of the earth require long and difficult preparations, before they are rendered fit to supply the wants of men.
~ Turgot ~
2018
I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus — and even inside it — idealism is under siege — beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism, chismism, I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him?
~ Bono ~
2019
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. … Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. … What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age?
~ Bono ~
2020
In choosing a theory, one should pay attention to simplicity in hypotheses only. Simplicity in computation can be of no weight in the balance of probabilities. Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. She avoids complication only in means. Nature seems to have proposed to do much with little: it is a principle that the development of physics constantly supports by new evidence.
~ Augustin-Jean Fresnel ~
2021
If nature has offered to produce the maximum effect with minimum causes, it is in all of its laws that it had to solve this major problem. It is without doubt difficult to discover the foundations of this wonderful economy, i.e. the simplest causes of phenomena considered from such a wide point of view. But if this general principle of the philosophy of physics does not lead immediately to the knowledge of truth, it can direct the efforts of the human spirit, by leading it away from theories which relate the phenomena to too many different causes, and by adopting preferably those based on the smallest number of assumptions, which show to be more fruitful in consequences.
~ Augustin-Jean Fresnel ~
2022
Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now. ... The people in Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you are fighting for all of us who love freedom.
~ Bono ~
2023
You know I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited like an old building that you move into when the previous generation moves out or gets chased out. But it's not. The future is not fixed, it's fluid. … The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.
~ Bono ~
2024
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3 : Very Good – strong desire to see it used.
2 : Good – some desire to see it used.
1 : Acceptable – but with no particular desire to see it used.
0 : Not acceptable – not appropriate for use as a quote of the day.
An averaging of the rankings provided to each suggestion produces it’s general ranking in considerations for selection of Quote of the Day. The selections made are usually chosen from the top ranked options existing on the page, but the provision of highly ranked late additions, especially in regard to special events (most commonly in regard to the deaths of famous people, or other major social or physical occurrences), always remain an option for final selections.
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Suggestions edit

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all. ~ Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, (d. 10 May 1696)

  • 3 --Aphaia 05:27, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 05:07, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 02:10, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Since La Bruyère was born on August 16, I would propose that this quote be transferred to that date. - InvisibleSun 15:40, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain. ~ Karl Barth (born May 10)

  • 3 because the image of God is not visible to the physical man...for the man of the material world is blinded by illusion. Zarbon 05:21, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki (talk · contributions) 03:36, 30 April 2010 (UTC) * 2 Kalki 02:10, 9 May 2008 (UTC) the statement is true, but without greater context can easily be misinterpreted to mean things Barth had not intended which are false.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 15:40, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time. ~ Karl Barth

  • 3 Kalki 09:22, 9 May 2009 (UTC) (though this might be better around Christmas time or on a Good Friday)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 22:31, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

[The Harvard Observatory Computers included] Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and] Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who] discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to Cecilia Payne, whose] "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. ~ In commemoration of the May 10, 1900 birth of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, from the eighth episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

  • 4 Pithy Francoln (talk) 23:58, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
  • 1 ♌︎Kalki ⚓︎ 23:52, 9 May 2017 (UTC) without any disregard of the worth of any of those mentioned, I simply believe that this is a rather low quality statement for use as QOTD.

I find nothing so painful as having to lead men.
~ Augustin-Jean Fresnel ~

It's not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.
~ Augustin-Jean Fresnel ~

If one was sometimes led astray by trying to simplify the elements of a science, it is because one has established systems before putting together a fairly large number of facts. Some assumption, which would be very simple when one considers only a class of phenomena, requires many other assumptions if one wants to leave the narrow circle in which we had initially withdrawn.
~ Augustin-Jean Fresnel ~
  • 2, with a lean toward 3 ♌︎Kalki ⚓︎ 00:23, 10 May 2021 (UTC), (this is the trimmed-out remainder and lead portion of a partially-used previous suggestion first provided on 9 May 2018, and the other portion used 10 May 2021).

Every soil does not produce every material.
~ Turgot ~

The productions which the earth supplies to satisfy the different wants of man, will not, for the most part, administer to those wants, in the state nature affords them; it is necessary they should undergo different operations, and be prepared by art. Wheat must be converted into flour, then into bread; hides must be dressed or tanned; wool and cotton must be spun; silk must be taken from the cod; hemp and flax must be soaked, peeled, spun, and wove into different textures; then cut and sewed together again to make garments, &c. If the same man who cultivates on his own land these different articles, and who raises them to supply his wants, was obliged to perform all the intermediate operations himself, it is certain he would succeed very badly.
~ Turgot ~

Not only there does not exist, nor can exist, any other revenue than the clear produce of land, but it is the earth also that has furnished all capitals, that form the mass of all the advances of culture and commerce. It has produced, without culture, the first gross and indispensible advances of the first labourers; all the rest are the accumulated fruits of the œconomy of successive ages, since they have begun to cultivate the earth. This œconomy has effect not only on the revenues of proprietors, but also on the profits of all the members of laborious classes. It is even generally true, that, though the proprietors have more overplus, they spare less; for, having more treasure, they have more desires, and more passions; they think themselves better ensured of their fortune; and are more desirous of enjoying it contentedly, than to augment it; luxury is their pursuit.
~ Turgot ~

History, like God, is watching what we do.
~ Bono ~

It's an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. That should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it's become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept.
~ Bono ~

I didn't expect change to come so slow, so agonizingly slow. I didn't realize that the biggest obstacle to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons, or the Establishment, or the boot heel of whatever you consider 'the Man' to be, it was something much more subtle. As the Provost just referred to, a combination of our own indifference and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of 'no's you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy.
~ Bono ~

I'm not that interested in charity. I'm interested in justice.
~ Bono ~

I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan of America, I'm one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn't live up to that...
I'm that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I've read the Constitution of the United States, and they are some liner notes, dude.
~ Bono ~

We love the crackle and the hustle, we love the spirit that gives the finger to fate, the spirit that says there's no hurdle we can't clear and no problem we can't fix.
~ Bono ~