Chew

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

A horse can long for the water, but it cannot make it fall from the sky.

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

No Less

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

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

Knowing when to stop

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

Peer Review

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

This too shall pass

All is ephemeral, – fame and the famous as well.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Marketplace

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

Beyond Big Brother

Whenever people think of Orwell today they usually think also of security cameras and ‘Big Brother’. Orwell represents much more than that. He saw that language and writing can be perverted to deceive people rather than inform them. If we remember that single lesson then his legacy will remain secure.

Nick Bardsley (“Orwell is funny“)

Resist Futilism

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Marshall McLuhan

Web 6.66

No machine can replace the human spark: spirit, compassion, love and understanding.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr. 

Obfuscation

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.

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

In the Ghetto

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

Sea Pirates

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

Dare & Encourage

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The means sanctify the end.

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

Laughing all the way to the cemetary

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

George W. Bush (spoken at a Washington Dinner, March 2001)

Love & Power

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

Jimi Hendrix

Not one penny

The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half, and enjoyed myself — the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.

Charles Darwin (to Emma Darwin, April, 1858)