Wikiquote:Quote of the day/June 2010


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June 1
 

There is a legend about a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. Dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of the great pain. … Or so says the legend.

~ Colleen McCullough ~

 


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June 2

 

The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

~ Thomas Hardy ~

 


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June 3
 

You can't incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, no matter how much we pay him.

~ Lawrence Lessig ~

 


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June 4
 

Knowledge is meaningful only if it is reflected in action. The human race has found out the hard way that we are what we do, not just what we think. This is true for kids and adults — for schoolrooms and nations.

~ Robert Fulghum ~

 


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June 5
  The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

~ John Maynard Keynes ~

 


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June 6
 

I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.

~ Thomas Mann ~

 


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June 7
  Art hurts. Art urges voyages — and it is easier to stay at home.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks ~

 


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June 8
 

Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar ~

 


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June 9
 

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above.
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love
Don't fence me in.

Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please
Don't fence me in.

~ Cole Porter ~

 


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June 10
 

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?

~ Saul Bellow ~

 


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June 11
 

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.

~ Ben Jonson ~

 


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June 12
 

Everyone's got the same insecurities as you
Believe me it is true
Do not be afraid
To show people the real you.

~ Justin Heazlewood ~

 


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June 13
 

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

~ William Butler Yeats ~

 


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June 14
 

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

~ Harry Turtledove ~

 


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June 15
 

There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.

~ William McFee ~

 


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June 16
 

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

~ James Joyce ~
in
Ulysses

 


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June 17
 

The result of the struggle between the thought and the ability to express it, between dream and reality, is seldom more than a compromise or an approximation.

~ M. C. Escher ~

 


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June 18
 

It is an interesting law of romance that a truly strong woman will choose a strong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along. Strength demands intelligence, intelligence demands stimulation, and weakness is boring. It is better to find a partner you can contend with for a lifetime than one who accommodates you because he doesn't really care.

~ Roger Ebert ~

 


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June 19

 

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi ~

 


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June 20
 

The Tennessee stud was long and lean
The color of the sun and his eyes were green.
He had the nerve and he had the blood
And there never was a hoss like the Tennessee stud.

~ Jimmy Driftwood ~

 


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June 21
 

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. ... To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

 


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June 22
 

In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

~ Julian Huxley ~

 


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June 23
 

As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,
There lays in me one wonderful remembrance.
I am not able and don't want to miss this:
It is my torture and my utter gladness.

I think, that he whose look will be directed
Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.

~ Anna Akhmatova ~

 


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June 24
 

Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

~ Ambrose Bierce ~

 


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June 25
 

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. ... Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger ... have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

~ George Orwell ~

 


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June 26
 

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.

~ Pearl S. Buck ~

 


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June 27
 

The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.

~ Helen Keller ~

 


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June 28
  Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ~

 


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June 29
 

What though our eyes with tears be wet?
The sunrise never failed us yet.

The blush of dawn may yet restore
Our light and hope and joy once more.
Sad soul, take comfort, nor forget
That sunrise never failed us yet!

~ Celia Thaxter ~

 


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June 30
  Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning
They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals,
So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.
~ Czesław Miłosz ~
 


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Today is Friday, November 8, 2024; it is now 17:21 (UTC)