Wikiquote:Quote of the day/May 2016

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Today is Friday, November 8, 2024; it is now 18:21 (UTC)


May 1
 
We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ~
 

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May 2
 
No explanation is required for Holy Writing. Whoso speaks truly is full of eternal life, and wonderfully related to genuine mysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.
~ Novalis ~
 

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May 3
 
Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything: so that the desire being always greater than the acquisition, there results discontent with the possession and little satisfaction to themselves from it
~ Niccolò Machiavelli ~
 

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May 4
 
The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
~ T. H. Huxley ~
 

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May 5
 
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
~ Søren Kierkegaard ~
 

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May 6
 
All shall be well, I'm telling you, let the winter come and go
All shall be well again, I know.
~ Sydney Carter ~
 

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May 7
 
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
~ Rabindranath Tagore ~
 

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May 8
 
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
~ E. M. Forster ~
 

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May 9
 
We can know America through our flag which is its symbol … In our flag the barriers of time and space vanish. All America that ever was and ever will be lives every moment in our flag. Wherever in the world two or three of us stand together under our flag, all America is there. When we stand proudly and salute our flag, that is what we know wordlessly in the passing moment. … Understand that our flag is not the cloth but the pattern of form and color manifested in the cloth … It could have been any pattern once, but our fathers chose that one. History has made it sacred. The honor paid it in uncounted acts of individual reverence has made it live. Every morning in American schoolrooms children present their hearts to our flag. Every morning and evening we render it our military salutes. And so the pattern lives and it can manifest itself in any number of bits of perishable cloth, but the pattern is indestructible.
~ Richard McKenna ~
 

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May 10
 
We are magic. It is magic that we're walking around. It's fantastic magic. Some people would call it miracles; I like to call it magic. … I'm very aware of this. Yes, the more aware I get, the more I can understand how big it is, how big it will get. It'll be harder to comprehend; that's why I have to go along with it, 'cause its so vast. To say to somebody that God is everything that lives and ever has lived and ever will live, and you're never going to touch and see, smell and be everything that is God. Magic is very hard to comprehend.
~ Donovan ~
 

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May 11
 
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti ~
 

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May 12
 
What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then.
~ Florence Nightingale ~
 

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May 13
 
Occasionally, there may come a dreamer who is aware that he is dreaming. He may control something of the dream-stuff, bending it to his will, or he may awaken into greater self-knowledge. If he chooses the path of self-knowledge, his glory is great and he shall be for all ages like unto a star. If he chooses instead the way of the Tantras, combining Samsara and Nirvana, comprehending the world and continuing to live in it, this one is mighty among dreamers.
~ Roger Zelazny ~
in
~ Lord of Light ~
 

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May 14
 
Remember... the Force will be with you, always.
~ George Lucas ~
in
~ Star Wars ~
 

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May 15
 
To destroy an offender cannot benefit society so much as to redeem him.
~ L. Frank Baum ~
 

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May 16
 
If I were in a wood, I could easily hear the Voice which came to me. It seemed to me to come from lips I should reverence. I believe it was sent me from God. When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the Voice of an Angel. This Voice has always guarded me well, and I have always understood it; it instructed me to be good and to go often to Church; it told me it was necessary for me to come into France.
~ Joan of Arc ~
 

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May 17
 
Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
~ Henri Barbusse ~
 

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May 18
 
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
~ Bertrand Russell ~
 

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May 19
 
Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
~ Abraham Pais ~
 

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May 20
 
When an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
~ John Stuart Mill ~
 

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May 21
 
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.
~ Alexander Pope ~
 

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May 22
 
The ancient intuition that all matter, allreality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. … The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One.
~ Peter Matthiessen ~
 

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May 23
 
We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.
Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.
~ Margaret Fuller ~
 

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May 24
 
Our course of advance ... is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes, compromises often … between "positivism and idealism". The notion that a jurist can dispense with any consideration as to what the law ought to be arises from the fiction that the law is a complete and closed system, and that judges and jurists are mere automata to record its will or phonographs to pronounce its provisions.
~ Benjamin N. Cardozo ~
 

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May 25
 
I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty year, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
 

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May 26
 
I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.
~ Ward Cunningham ~
 

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May 27
 
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
~ Henry Kissinger ~
 

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May 28
 
The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.
~ Louis Agassiz ~
 

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May 29
 
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the liedeliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the mythpersistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
~ John F. Kennedy ~
 

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May 30
 
The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.
I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.
 Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.
~ Mikhail Bakunin ~
 

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May 31
 

I answer for him that answers for all, and send these signs.

Him all wait for, him all yield up to, his word is decisive and final,
Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light,
Him they immerse and he immerses them.

Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape, people, animals,
The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, (so tell I my morning's romanza,)
All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,
The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,
The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he domiciles there,
Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him, the ships in the offing,
The perpetual shows and marches on land are for him if they are for anybody.

He puts things in their attitudes,
He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love,
He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest never shame them afterward, nor assume to command them.

He is the Answerer,
What can be answer'd he answers, and what cannot be answer'd he shows how it cannot be answer'd.

A man is a summons and challenge,
(It is vain to skulk — do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you hear the ironical echoes?)

~ Walt Whitman ~
in
~ Song of the Answerer ~
 

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Today is Friday, November 8, 2024; it is now 18:21 (UTC)