Wikiquote:Quote of the day/June 2010
- 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. |
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- June 2
 
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The ancient pulse of germ and birth At once a voice arose among So little cause for carolings ~ Thomas Hardy ~ |
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- June 3
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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
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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
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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. | .png)
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- June 6
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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
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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. |
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- June 9
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Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze ~ Cole Porter ~ |
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- June 10
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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
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Drink to me only with thine eyes, ~ Ben Jonson ~ |
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- June 12
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Everyone's got the same insecurities as you |
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- June 13
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I am content to follow to its source |
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- June 14
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Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen. ~ Harry Turtledove ~ |
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- June 15
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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
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It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. ~ James Joyce ~ |
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- June 17
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. |
- June 22
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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
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As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, I think, that he whose look will be directed ~ Anna Akhmatova ~ |
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- June 24
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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
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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
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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
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The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction. ~ Helen Keller ~ |
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- June 28
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Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse. | 
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- June 29
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What though our eyes with tears be wet? The blush of dawn may yet restore ~ Celia Thaxter ~ |
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- June 30
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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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