Wikiquote:Quote of the day/April 2021

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April 1

Man comes into the world naked and unarmed, as if nature had destined him for a social creature, and ordained him to live under equitable laws and in peace; as if she had desired that he should be guided by reason rather than be driven by force; therefore did she endow him with understanding, and furnish him with hands, that he might himself contrive what was necessary to his clothing and protection. To those animals to which nature has given vast strength, she has also presented weapons in harmony with their powers; to those that are not thus vigorous, she has given ingenuity, cunning, and singular dexterity in avoiding injury.

~ William Harvey ~

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April 2

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

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April 3

Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change.

~ Jane Goodall ~

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April 4

Your God still walks in Eden, between the ancient trees,
Where Youth and Love go wading through pools of primroses.
And this is the sign we bring you, before the darkness fall,
That Spring is risen, is risen again,
That Life is risen, is risen again,
That Love is risen, is risen again, and Love is Lord of all.

~ Alfred Noyes ~

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April 5

The source of every Crime, is some defect of the Understanding; or some error in Reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. Defect in the Understanding, is Ignorance; in Reasoning, Erroneous Opinion.

~ Thomas Hobbes ~

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April 6

This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. ... As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.

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April 7

There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions. There will be no dialogue among the religions without global ethical standards. There will therefore be no survival of this globe without a global ethic.

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April 8

I am a rebel by birth. … I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity. My feelings about that are so strong, I don't think I could live with myself if I weren't honest.

~ Yip Harburg ~

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April 9

Come, pluck up a good heart; speak the truth and shame the devil.

~ François Rabelais ~

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April 10

It is an old cliché to say that the future is in the hands of the young. This is no longer true. The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.

~ Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh ~

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April 11

When my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.
My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

~ Kurt Vonnegut ~

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April 12

I have heard something said on this and a former occasion about allegiance to the South. I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance. I owe allegiance to two sovereignty, and only two: one is the sovereignty of this Union, and the other is the sovereignty of the state of Kentucky. My allegiance is to this Union and to my state; but if gentlemen suppose they can exact from me an acknowledgement of allegiance to any ideal or future contemplated confederacy of the South, I here declare that I owe no allegiance to it; nor will I, for one, come under any such allegiance if I can avoid it.

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April 13

If we do not learn to sacrifice small differences of opinion, we can never act together. Every man cannot have his way in all things. If his own opinion prevails at some times, he should acquiesce on seeing that of others preponderate at others. Without this mutual disposition we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.

~ Thomas Jefferson ~

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April 14

The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

~ James Branch Cabell ~

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April 15

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

~ Henry James ~

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April 16

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

~ Anatole France ~

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April 17

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

~ Thornton Wilder ~

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April 18

The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art, even although he may lack the qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some minor details. It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man. The strength of a beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his strongest.

~ George Henry Lewes ~

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April 19

It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature. … In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans … The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.

~ Albert Hofmann ~

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April 20

Excuse me while I light my spliff (spliff)
Good God I gotta' take a lift (lift)
From reality I just can't drift (drift)
That's why I am staying with this riff (riff)

Take it easy, easy skanking
Got to take it easy, easy skanking.

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April 21

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.

~ Walter Mondale ~

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April 22

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

~ Louise Glück ~

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April 23

Be collected;
No more amazement; tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.

~ William Shakespeare ~
in
~ The Tempest ~

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April 24

The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.

~ Anthony Trollope ~

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April 25

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point.

~ Wolfgang Pauli ~

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April 26

If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.

~ Marcus Aurelius ~

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April 27

My confidence in General Grant was not entirely due to the brilliant military successes achieved by him, but there was a moral as well as military basis for my faith in him. He had shown his single-mindedness and superiority to popular prejudice by his prompt cooperation with President Lincoln in his policy of employing colored troops, and his order commanding his soldiers to treat such troops with due respect. In this way he proved himself to be not only a wise general, but a great man.

~ Frederick Douglass ~

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April 28

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

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April 29

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied. I am not a naïve man. I don’t believe that a glance from 100,000 miles would cause a Prime Minister to scurry back to his parliament with a disarmament plan, but I do think it would plant a seed that ultimately could grow into such concrete action.

~ Michael Collins ~

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April 30

Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.

~ Taisen Deshimaru ~

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Today is Saturday, April 20, 2024; it is now 11:01 (UTC)

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