Wikiquote:Quote of the day/July 2013

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Today is Friday, July 18, 2025; it is now 20:44 (UTC)

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July 1

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~

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July 2

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.

~ Hermann Hesse ~

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July 3

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.

~ William Henry Davies ~

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July 4

Well, if I eat it, and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!

~ Lewis Carroll ~
in
~ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ~

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July 5

Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.

~ Jean Cocteau ~

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July 6

I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others. When you have a pure, sincere motivation, then you have right attitude toward others based on kindness, compassion, love and respect. Practice brings the clear realisation of the oneness of all human beings and the importance of others benefiting by your actions.

~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama ~

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July 7

A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.

~ Robert A. Heinlein ~
in
~ The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ~

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July 8

We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them.

~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross ~

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July 9

The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

~ David Hockney ~

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July 10

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

~ Arthur Ashe ~

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July 11

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

~ E. B. White ~

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July 12

We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

~ Buckminster Fuller ~

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July 13

I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

~ Kenneth Clark ~

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July 14

No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

~ Ingmar Bergman ~

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July 15

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

~ Walter Benjamin ~

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July 16

To my mind, the expression of divinity is in variety, and the more variable the creation, the more variable the creatures that surround us, botanical and zoological, the more chance we have to learn and to see into life itself, nature itself. ... we need variety. We came from that, we were born from that, it's our world, the world in which we became what we have become.

~ Sheri S. Tepper ~

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July 17

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

~ Isaac Watts ~

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July 18

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for. But, my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

~ Nelson Mandela ~

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July 19

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

~ Edgar Degas ~

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July 20

To be able to say how much you love is to love but little.

~ Petrarch ~

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July 21

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.

~ J. K. Rowling ~
in
~ Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone ~

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July 22

He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man. And he began with the simple things that everybody's known and felt — the freshness of a fine morning when you're young, and the taste of food when you're hungry, and the new day that's every day when you're a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man. But without freedom, they sickened.

~ Stephen Vincent Benét ~

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July 23

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

~ Raymond Chandler ~

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July 24

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.

~ Amelia Earhart ~

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July 25

Where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. One would rather see the world run by men who set their hearts on toys but are accessible to pity, than by men animated by lofty ideals whose dedication makes them ruthless. In the chemistry of man's soul, almost all noble attributes — courage, honor, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. — can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

~ Eric Hoffer ~

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July 26

I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style.

~ Stanley Kubrick ~

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July 27

The thing about dancers is they're a certain breed. You don't do it to become rich and famous, you don't do it to have a really long career or to be the star, you do it because you can't imagine your life not doing it.

~ Cat Deeley ~

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July 28

One man can make a difference and every man should try.

~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis ~

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July 29

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld ~

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July 30

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idle froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The stedfast rock of immortality.

~ Emily Brontë ~

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July 31

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

~ Milton Friedman ~

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Today is Friday, July 18, 2025; it is now 20:44 (UTC)