Wikiquote:Quote of the day/September 2010


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September 1
 

We've traveled halfway 'round the world
To find ourselves again —
September morn —
We danced until the night became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes from some romantic play —
September morning still can make me feel that way.

~ Neil Diamond ~

 


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September 2
 

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

~ Henry George ~

 


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September 3
 

Your patience may have long to wait,
Whether in little things or great,
But all good luck, you soon will learn,
Must come to those who nobly earn.
Who hunts the hay-field over
Will find the four-leaved clover.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett ~

 


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September 4
 

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

~ Mary Renault ~

 


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September 5
 

Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.

~ Black Elk ~

 


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September 6
 

An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

~ Frances Wright ~

 


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September 7
 

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

~ Edith Sitwell ~

 


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September 8
 

Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide
And something to fear
And I try so hard to keep it inside
So no one can hear.

"Hush, hush, keep it down now.
Voices carry."

~ Aimee Mann ~

 


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September 9
 

One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions — the truth that for our life one law is valid — the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.

~ Leo Tolstoy ~

 


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September 10
 

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

~ Charles Sanders Peirce ~

 


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September 11

 

We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further — we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all — in pain as in prosperity — has gripped young and old. In the early beginnings of the 21st century — a century already violently disabused of any hopes that progress towards global peace and prosperity is inevitable — this new reality can no longer be ignored. It must be confronted.

~ Kofi Annan ~

 


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September 12
  It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

~ Charles Dudley Warner ~

 


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September 13
 

Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.

~ Sherwood Anderson ~

 


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September 14
 

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

~ Sydney J. Harris ~

 


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September 15
 

The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.

~ Agatha Christie ~

 


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September 16
 

Thou whose deep ways are in the sea,
Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee
Is waiting — at Thy Throne.

The towering Babels that we raised
Where scoffing sophists brawl,
The little Antichrists we praised —
The night is on them all.

~ Alfred Noyes ~

 


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September 17
 

What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.

~ Ken Kesey ~

 


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September 18
 

To contribute usefully to the advance of science, one must sometimes not disdain from undertaking simple verifications.

~ Léon Foucault ~

 


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September 19

 

Hard I strove
To put away my immortality,
Till my collected spirits swell'd my heart
Almost to bursting; but the strife is past.
It is a fearful thing to be a god,
And, like a god, endure a mortal's pain;
To be a show for earth and wondering heaven
To gaze and shudder at! But I will live,
That Jove may know there is a deathless soul
Who ne'er will be his subject. Yes, 'tis past.
The stedfast Fates confess my absolute will, —
Their own co-equal.

~ Hartley Coleridge ~

 


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September 20
 

The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

~ Leo Strauss ~

 


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September 21
 

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.

~ Stephen King ~

 


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September 22
 

I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it … Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge.

~ Michael Faraday ~

 


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September 23
 

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature — whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation — Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley ~

   


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September 24
  Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald ~

 


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September 25
 

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

~ William Faulkner ~

 


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September 26
 

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

~ T. S. Eliot
in
The Four Quartets

 


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September 27
 

In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practised, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind.

~ Samuel Adams ~

 


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September 28
 

It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin. It is characteristic of the superior man, appearing insipid, yet never to produce satiety; while showing a simple negligence, yet to have his accomplishments recognized; while seemingly plain, yet to be discriminating. He knows how what is distant lies in what is near. He knows where the wind proceeds from. He knows how what is minute becomes manifested. Such a one, we may be sure, will enter into virtue.

~ Confucius ~

 


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September 29
 

The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

~ Miguel de Unamuno ~

 


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September 30
 

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don't claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.

~ Rumi ~

 


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Today is Sunday, November 10, 2024; it is now 09:00 (UTC)