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Wikiquote:Quote of the day/January 2014

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January 1

  

44

A legend is sung of when England was young,
And Knights were brave and bold.
The good King had died, and no one could decide
Who was rightful heir to the Throne.
It seemed that the land would be torn by war,
Or saved by a miracle alone —
And that miracle appeared in London town:
The Sword in the Stone.

~ The Sword in the Stone ~
 

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January 2

  



There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

~ Isaac Asimov ~







 


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January 3
 

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

~ J. R. R. Tolkien ~
in
~ The Return of the King ~



 

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January 4

  


Christ is called the righteous & by his righteousness we are saved & except our righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees we shall not enter into the kingdome of heaven. Righteousness is the religion of the kingdom of heaven & even the property of God himself towards man. Righteousness & Love are inseparable for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

~ Isaac Newton ~


 

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January 5

  

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

~ Umberto Eco ~


 

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January 6

  

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

~ Alan Watts ~





  

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January 7
 



Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

~ Gerald Durrell ~


 

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January 8
 

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society.

~ A. J. Muste ~


 

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January 9
 



Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

~ Simone de Beauvoir ~


 

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January 10

  

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

~ Robinson Jeffers ~



 

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January 11


  




There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

~ William James ~



 


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January 12
 

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

~ Edmund Burke ~


 

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January 13

  



Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding.

~ G. I. Gurdjieff ~






 




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January 14


  

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives — only that ethic can be founded in thought. ... The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

~ Albert Schweitzer ~







 



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January 15
 

Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law:
Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest.

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ~


 

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January 16
 

From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

~ Susan Sontag ~


 

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January 17
 



All I know is that I'm tired of being clever
Everybody's clever these days.

Take a win
Take a fall
I never wanted your love
But I needed it all…

~ Zooey Deschanel ~









 

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January 18
 

"Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

~ Robert Anton Wilson ~


∴

∵

 


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January 19
 



Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

~ Edgar Allan Poe ~


 

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January 20
 



Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

~ Federico Fellini ~

File:Filmaward (color background).png

 

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January 21
 

It is bad policy to fear the resentment of an enemy.

~ Ethan Allen ~


 

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January 22
 

As a Buddhist, I was trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.

~ U Thant ~


 

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January 23


  

A cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now… empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...

~ Walter M. Miller, Jr. ~




 

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January 24
 

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

~ Edith Wharton ~


 

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January 25
 


Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.

~ W. Somerset Maugham ~


 

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January 26

  




Let's give this entity which you call soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contrary definitions.
Speak the word soul, and unbelievers will automatically become deaf to what follows. Those who believe in souls will always hear you through the mental constructs that they formed on Earth. Let us call this nonmatter twin the... ah... ka…

~ Philip José Farmer ~


 

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January 27
 


Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

~ John Updike ~


 

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January 28

  

I am a sincere man
from where the palm tree grows,
and before I die I wish
to pour forth the verses from my soul.

~ José Martí ~


 

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January 29
 


If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

~ Thomas Paine ~




 

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January 30



  

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

~ Richard Brautigan ~



 


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January 31



  


Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

~ Augustine of Hippo ~




  


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