Wikiquote:Quote of the day/August 2008
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Today is Friday, April 19, 2024; it is now 15:48 (UTC)
- August 1
| All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. ~ Herman Melville in Moby-Dick |  |
- August 2
| Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. ~ James Baldwin |  |
- August 3
| I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme — if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one. ~ Clifford D. Simak |
- August 4
| Throughout American history, there have been moments that call on us to meet the challenges of an uncertain world, and pay whatever price is required to secure our freedom. ~ Barack Obama |  |
- August 5
| Those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
- August 6
| I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in "In Memoriam A.H.H." ~ |
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- August 7
| The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity. ~ Alan Keyes |  |
- August 8
| If I am peaceful, I shall see Beauty's face continually; Feeding on her wine and bread I shall be wholly comforted, For she can make one day for me Rich as my lost eternity. ~ Sara Teasdale ~ |
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- August 9
| The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. ~ Jean Piaget | 
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- August 10
| We are living in a time of trouble and bewilderment, in a time when none of us can foresee or foretell the future. But surely it is in times like these, when so much that we cherish is threatened or in jeopardy, that we are impelled all the more to strengthen our inner resources, to turn to the things that have no news value because they will be the same to-morrow that they were to-day and yesterday — the things that last, the things that the wisest, the most farseeing of our race and kind have been inspired to utter in forms that can inspire ourselves in turn. ~ Laurence Binyon |  |
- August 11
| There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll |  |
- August 12
| It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated. ~ Edith Hamilton | .JPG) |
- August 13
| It is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. ~ Felix Adler |  |
- August 14
| Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong. ~ Russell Baker |  |
- August 15
| A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root. ~ Napoleon I of France |  |
- August 16
| It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not. ~ Jean de La Bruyère |  |
- August 17
| Everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. ~ V. S. Naipaul |  |
- August 18
| Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! ~ Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita |  |
- August 19
| Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? Oh curst Effects of necessary Law! How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan, Beware the Fury of a Patient Man. ~ John Dryden ~ |
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- August 20
| There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience. ~ Roger Wolcott Sperry |  |
- August 21
| A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. ~ Leon Trotsky |
- August 22
| Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. ~ Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. |  |
- August 23
| A few Cobras in your home will soon clear it of Rats and Mice. Of course, you will still have the Cobras. ~ Will Cuppy |  |
- August 24
| A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. ~ Jorge Luis Borges |  |
- August 25
| Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche |  |
- August 26
| I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it. ~ Christopher Isherwood |  |
- August 27
| In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction. ~ Giuseppe Peano |  |
- August 28
| To which of the warring serpents should I turn with the problem that now faces me? It is easy, and tempting, to choose the god of Science. Now I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is its symbol. It is a powerful god indeed but it is what the students of ancient gods called a shape-shifter, and sometimes a trickster. ~ Robertson Davies |
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- August 29
| Mankind has advanced. Human progress is ceaseless. We can ... conclude that building just societies is a fool's errand. We are always, despite our advances, only one sin away from slipping into the abyss of terror and ignorance. But that is not so. Generations upon generations have driven the human race farther and farther from darkness. ~ John McCain |  |
- August 30
| Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. ~ Warren Buffett |  |
- August 31
| The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops. ~ William Saroyan |  |
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Today is Friday, April 19, 2024; it is now 15:48 (UTC)