Wikiquote:Quote of the day/April 2011


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April 1
 

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

~ Abraham Maslow ~

 


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April 2
 

My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good. My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it. It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.

~ Giacomo Casanova ~

 


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April 3
 

We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance. Only by learning to love one another can our world be saved. Only love can conquer all.

~ Dora Russell ~

 


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April 4

 


You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

~ Maya Angelou ~

 


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April 5
 

At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death;
Death could not sever my soul and you,
As these have severed your soul from me.

~ Algernon Swinburne ~

 


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April 6
 


I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.

~ Gustave Moreau ~


 


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April 7
 

When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.

~ Henry Kuttner ~

 


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April 8
 

Life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When o’er the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

~ Langdon Smith ~

 


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April 9
 

Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.

~ François Rabelais ~

 


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April 10
 


Oh Master of the Beautiful,
Creating us from hour to hour,
Give me this vision to the full
To see in lightest things thy power!
This vision give, no heaven afar,
No throne, and yet I will rejoice,
Knowing beneath my feet a star,
Thy word in every wandering voice.

~ Æ ~

 


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April 11
 

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.

~ Leo Rosten ~

 


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April 12

 


I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty. There are some ten thousand religious sects — each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain — which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief. And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why — which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive.

~ Jon Krakauer ~

 


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April 13
 

There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

~ Thomas Jefferson ~

 


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April 14
 

It is necessary that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights there is silence.

~ James Branch Cabell ~


 


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April 15

 

I am a being of Heaven and Earth,
of thunder and lightning,
of rain and wind,
of the galaxies,
of the suns and the stars
and the void through which they travel.
The essence of nature,
eternal, divine that all men seek to know to hear,
known as the great illusion time,
and the all-prevailing atmosphere.
And now you know my background.

~ eden ahbez ~

 


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April 16
 

It is well for the heart to be naive and for the mind not to be.

~ Anatole France ~

 


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April 17

 

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.

~ Wallace Stevens ~

 


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April 18
 

Instead … of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels, one warehouses, another villas.

~ George Henry Lewes ~

 


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April 19
 
We painters use the same license as poets and madmen.
~ Paolo Veronese ~
 


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April 20
 

Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.

~ Dinah Craik ~

 


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April 21
 

Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.

~ Rollo May ~

 


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April 22






 



Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

~ Vladimir Nabokov ~







 





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April 23
 

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

~ William Shakespeare ~
in
A Midsummer Night's Dream

 


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April 24
 



However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction. He ought rather to be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of.

~ Vincent de Paul ~

 


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April 25
 

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

~ Sun Tzu ~

 


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April 26
 

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price … One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

~ Morris West ~

 


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April 27

 

The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful to society, had that society been well organized.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft ~



 


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April 28



 

“The secret is not to dream … The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.”
I'll never be like this again, she thought, as she saw the terror in the Queen's face. I'll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I've been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.
And the reward is giving it back, too. No human could live like this. You could spend a day looking at a flower to see how wonderful it is, and that wouldn't get the milking done. No wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really is … no one could stand that for long.

~ Terry Pratchett ~
in
The Wee Free Men

 

 


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April 29

 


If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous.

~ Henri Poincaré ~

 


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April 30
 

Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.

~ Taisen Deshimaru ~

 


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Today is Wednesday, November 20, 2024; it is now 20:08 (UTC)