All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Chew
Published March 5, 2007 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Leave a CommentTags: experience, Honesty, thoughts
A horse can long for the water, but it cannot make it fall from the sky.
Published February 28, 2007 Aeschylus Leave a CommentTags: God, grace, Pain, Sleep, Wisdom
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
Aristotle
Holy Curiosity
Published February 7, 2007 Albert Einstein Leave a CommentTags: curiosity, mystery, reality
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
Albert Einstein
None of us can save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and the only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Dean Koontz
All is ephemeral, – fame and the famous as well.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
They make a desert and call it peace.
Tacitus
It does not seem like a prison until you try to break out
Published January 29, 2007 Rosa Luxemburg Leave a CommentThose who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Rosa Luxemburg
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Marshall McLuhan
People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven’t got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.
Peter Ustinov
No machine can replace the human spark: spirit, compassion, love and understanding.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell (“Politics and the English Language“)
We and our Eurasian allies have always been at war with Eurasia.
Published January 26, 2007 Kurt Vonnegut Leave a CommentTags: television
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
Michael Harrington
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut
I want to be a scary hairy smelly man crying out in the wilderness like John the Baptist. I don’t want be Ned Flanders.
