My Favorite Quotes

   

One kind word can warm three winter months.     ...Chinese proverb

He who knows others is wise.  He who knows himself is enlightened.   ... Unknown

What we do not understand we do not possess.     ...Goethe

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of love and truth has always won.  There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it... always.     ...Ghandi

The scars on our hearts do not last forever.  They are the temporary signs of a 'tender soul' who has touched the earth and been burned by such a low descent.
     ... Marriane Williamson

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it.  It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
....Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.     ...Yiddish proverb

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.     
...Vernon Law, baseball pitcher

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.     ... Aldous Huxley

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.    ... Aldous Huxley

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt ... A. Huxley

"After all, they are just a pathological expression of the workings of DNA-driven mind..."     David Pearce

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.     
... Luciano de Crescenzo

No movement is dead if but a single voice cries from the darkness and disturbs the tranquility of apathy.      ...Unknown

If a man does his best, what else is there?     ... General George S. Patton

If you are going through hell, keep going.      ...Sir Winston Churchill

I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
     ...Thomas Alva Edison

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.      ...Edmund Burke

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
     ... Abraham Lincoln

We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction. 
    ... General Douglas MacArthur

Fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.      ...Unknown

A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life:

 1.  Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
 2.  Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
 3.  Never spend your money before you have it.
 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
 5.  Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.
 6.  We never repent of having eaten too little.
 7.  Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
 8. How much pain have cost us the evils which never have happened.
 9.  Take things always by their smooth handle.
10. When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
       ...Thomas Jefferson, 1825

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.
     ... Rabindrinath Tagorek

Joy and sorrow are inseparable.  Together they come and when one sits alone with you, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.      Kahlil Gibran

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
    ... M. Gandhi

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different... we laughed at them.  Smug in our certain awareness that... communal life must be more difficult even than nuclear family life, which we know, to our very nerve endings is disastrous.  We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future.  We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.      ...June Jordan

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.  She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt; she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.      ...Oscar Wilde

I only ask that you deceive me so completely that I may be able to believe myself beloved.      ...Balzac






Monsters of Love:  What is a Saint?

      A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.  It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.  Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.  His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.  It is good to have among us such men, such balancing  monsters of love .
  
..... Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers (1966)   

 



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