Wikiquote:Quote of the day/June 2011
With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents. |
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. ~ Sydney Smith ~ |
Be aware of wonder. And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word of all — LOOK. ~ Robert Fulghum ~ |
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10000 years ago. |
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. ~ Thomas Mann ~ |
A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up. ~ Paul Gauguin ~ |
Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality? ~ Scott Adams ~ |
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences |
Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. ~ Maurice Sendak ~ |
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 ~ |
I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure. ~ Djuna Barnes ~ |
In moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response to moral stimuli; but for them to retain their effect requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new priority of values. ~ Che Guevara ~ |
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the crudest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases. ~ Erik Erikson ~ |
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. ~ James Joyce ~ |
In brightest day, in blackest night, ~ Green Lantern ~ |
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Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever. |
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world. ~ Salman Rushdie ~ |
Ole Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise, Yeah, they ran through the briars an' they ran through the brambles ~ Jimmy Driftwood ~ |
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr ~ |
That government is best which makes itself unnecessary. |
You will hear thunder and remember me, ~ Anna Akhmatova ~ |
A thousand graces diffusing |
Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. ~ George Orwell ~ |
All of us, without being taught, have attained to a belief in some sort of divinity, though it is not easy for all men to know the precise truth about it, nor is it possible for those who do know it to tell it to all men. |
The lunatics end up in charge of everything. Sane, normal people don't need power trips. ~ James P. Hogan ~ |
Think not the bigotry of another is any excuse for your own. ~ John Wesley ~ |
The heart of God through his creation stirs, The waves of Time may devastate our lives, ~ Celia Thaxter ~
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And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical, ~ Czesław Miłosz ~ |