Wikiquote:Quote of the day/August 2012
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Today is Monday, December 30, 2024; it is now 14:42 (UTC)
| Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom? |
| ~ Herman Melville ~ |
| Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. |
| ~ James Baldwin ~ |
| We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe... |
| ~ Clifford D. Simak ~ |
| We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace. |
| ~ Barack Obama ~ |
| I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire. |
| ~ Wendell Berry ~ |
| Nine tithes of times Face-flatterer and backbiter are the same. And they, sweet soul, that most impute a crime Are pronest to it, and impute themselves, Wanting the mental range; or low desire Not to feel lowest makes them level all; Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain, To leave an equal baseness; and in this Are harlots like the crowd, that if they find Some stain or blemish in a name of note, Not grieving that their greatest are so small, Inflate themselves with some insane delight, And judge all nature from her feet of clay, Without the will to lift their eyes, and see Her godlike head crowned with spiritual fire, And touching other worlds. |
| ~ Alfred Tennyson ~ in ~ Idylls of the King ~ |
| It turns out a lot of people don’t get it. Wikipedia is like rock’n’roll; it’s a cultural shift. |
| ~ Jimmy Wales ~ |
| We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes. |
| ~ Henry Fairfield Osborn ~ |
| This darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light... |
| ~ P. L. Travers ~ |
| Being a politician is a poor profession. Being a public servant is a noble one. |
| ~ Herbert Hoover ~ |
| In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful Lo! We revealed it on the Night of Predestination. Ah, what will convey unto thee what the Night of Power is! The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the permission of their Lord, with all decrees. (The night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn. |
| ~ Al-Qur'an, Sura 97 : Al-Qadr ~ as translated by ~ M. M. Pickthall ~ |
| The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in Life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these principles is to build up a strong and more valiant and, above all, more scrupulous and more generous humanity. |
| ~ Pierre de Coubertin ~ |
| I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence. |
| ~ Felix Adler ~ |
| Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry! |
| ~ John Galsworthy ~ |
| The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal. |
| ~ Sri Aurobindo ~ |
| Rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: |
| ~ T. E. Lawrence ~ |
| The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness. |
| ~ Ted Hughes ~ |
| I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth. |
| ~ Brian Aldiss ~ |
| I'm not smart. I try to observe. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why. |
| ~ Bernard Baruch ~ |
| Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity. |
| ~ Roger Wolcott Sperry ~ |
| I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". |
| ~ Alicia Witt ~ |
| The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart. The objective of this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding, and to communicate impressions. Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search for the solution to the problems it poses — for the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving. Sometimes you light upon the picture in seconds; it might also require hours or days. But there is no standard plan, no pattern from which to work. |
| ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson ~ |
| It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. |
| ~ Arnold Toynbee ~ |
| One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that those beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. |
| ~ Jorge Luis Borges ~ |
| Whate'er of us lives in the hearts of others Is our truest and profoundest self. |
| ~ Johann Gottfried Herder ~ |
| The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them. |
| ~ John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir ~ |
| It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value. |
| ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ~ |
| The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order. |
| ~ Robertson Davies ~ |
| An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it. |
| ~ Maurice Maeterlinck ~ |
| My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine. |
| ~ Mary Shelley ~ |
| I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?" |
| ~ William Saroyan ~ |
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Today is Monday, December 30, 2024; it is now 14:42 (UTC)