It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow.
Washington Irving
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Category Archives: Quotations
Edwin Markham
There is a destiny that makes us brothers
None goes his way alone
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back onto our own
Charles W Eliot
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends;they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
Joseph Addison
Courage that grows from constitution, often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty, acts in a uniform manner.
Abraham Lincoln
Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he Is right and part with him when he goes wrong.
Thomas Paine
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
John Stuart Mill
The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome and England.
Francis Bacon
There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.
Feodor Dostoevski
It seems, in fact, as though but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions – the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
François Hollande
The time is past when humankind thought it could selfishly draw on exhaustible resources. We know now the world is not a commodity, is not a source of revenue; it’s a common good, it’s our heritage. And the consequences of climate change are fully known now – we’re not talking about theories anymore, we’re talking about certainties.
Ban Ki-moon
Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land, and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself.
Greta Thunberg
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
Bill Gates
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
Malcolm Turnbull
Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead and alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.
Gardens
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
Future
The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.
Friendship
Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow. It were almost to be wished that all true and faithful friends should expire on the same day.
Archibald MacLeish
To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
Thomas Carlyle
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity speech is shallow as Time.
Benjamin Franklin
If you would relish food, labor for it before you take it; if you enjoy clothing, pay for it before you wear it; if you would sleep soundly, take a clear conscience to bed with you.
Justice Felix Frankfurter
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
Phaedrus
Give time to your friends, leisure to your wife, relax your mind, give rest to your body, so that you may the better fulfil your accustomed occupation.
Khalil Gibran
That deed which in our guilt we today call weakness, will appear tomorrow as an essential link in the complete chain of man.
Clarence Day
Father expected a great deal of God. He did not actually accuse God of inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was loud and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give…….. In any case, the giving of love is an education in itself.
Francis Bowes Sayre
Humanity cannot go forward, civilizations cannot advance. Except as the philosophy of force is replaced by that of human brotherhood.
Peter Marshall
Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.
Abraham Lincoln
I do the very best I know how the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to any thing. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
Christopher Wren
Architecture has its political use; public buildings being the ornaments of a country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and commerce; makes the People love their native country, which Passion is the original of all great Actions in a Common wealth. Architecture aims at Eternity.
Cicero
History is the witness of the times, the torch of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.
Edward Everett Hale
I am only one
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Mark Twain
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Edmund Burke
Society is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living those who are dead and those who are to be born.
Plato
There are three arts which are concerned with all things, one which uses, another which makes and a third which imitates them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist had actually expressed.
Dente Alighieri
Art, as far as it has the ability, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master, so that art must be, as it were, a descendant of God.
Carl Sandburg
The Fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking
Over the harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then, moves on.
Walt Whitman
Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools,
Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is it’s own proof.
Richard M Nixon
Nothing matters more to the future of this Nation than insuring that our young men and women learn to believe in themselves and believe in their dreams, and that they develop this capacity that you develop this capacity, so that you keep it all of your lives.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in Color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Thomas Carlyle
The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it.
Henry David Thoreau
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
Dean Rusk
Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two thirds is up to something.
H L Mencken
The impulse to create beauty is rather rare in literary men. Far ahead of it comes the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning to make a noise.
Winston Churchill
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
Samuel Johnson
It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.
St Basil of Caesarea
And for those also, Dear Lord, the humble beasts, who with us bear the burden and heat of the day, and offer their guileless lives for the well being of their country, we supplicate thy great tenderness of heart for thou hast promised to save both man and beast. And great is thy loving kindness, oh master, savior of the world.
Carl N Degler
The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.
Cicero
For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well bred man than agriculture.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of Years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an untouchable brat, well birched and none the wiser.
Theodore Roosevelt
We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
John F Kennedy
With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessings and his help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
Elbert Green Hubbard
There is something that is much more scare, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
Georges Clemenceau
When a man ask himself what is meant by action he proves that he is not a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be some what in sane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail and not drift nor lie at anchor.
Georges Clemenceau
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he is not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.
Benedict Spinoza
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it; and consequently so long is it impossible to him that he should do it.
James Madison
Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
Ken Venturi
I don’t believe you have to be better than everybody else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.
Dalai Lama
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Dan Millman
I learned that we can do anything, but we can’t do everything… at least not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing is everything.
Jim Rohn
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Greer Garson
Starting out just to make money is the greatest mistake in life.
Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the money will come.
Nagarjuna
When young, rejoice in the tranquility of the old.
However, boast not of what you know even when learned.
However high may you rise, be not proud.
Samuel Ullman
Youth is not a time of life; It is a state of mind;
It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees;
It is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions;
It is the freshness of the deep springs of life………
Thomas Moore
How calm, how beautiful comes on The still hour, when storms have gone,
When warring winds have died away
And clouds, beneath the glancing ray
Melt off and leave the land and sea
Sleeping in bright tranquility.
Thucydides
Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few.
Thomas Merton
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself.
Walter D Wintle
If You think you are beaten.you are
If You think you dare not, you don not
If you would like to win, but think you cannot
It is almost a cinch you will not
If you think you will lose, you are lost
For out in the world we find
Success begins with a fellow’s will
It is all in the state of mind
Cicero
If you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains, if you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains.
Maggie Kuhn
I enjoy my wrinkles and regard them as badges of distinction.
I have worked hard for them!
George Eliot
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
Aristotle
Quote
No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
What we mean when we say we are for or against capitalism is that we like or dislike certain civilizations or scheme of life.
Eric Hoffer
It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncappitalist environment.
Kuan Chung
If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that. The days are made on a loom whereof the wrap and woof are past and future time.
John Donne
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears
Men reckon what it did and meant
But trepidation of the spheres
Though greater far is innocent
William Butler Yeats
But I being Poor, have only my dreams
I have spread my dreams under your feet
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams
Ernest Dowson
They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
With in a dream
Shakespeare
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on , and our little life
Is rounded out with a sleep
John Wesley
Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
At all the times you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can
William P. Rogers
The world of the future will not flourish behind walls no matter who builds them and no matter what their purpose. A world divided economically must inevitably be a world divided politically. As secretary of State, I cannot contemplate that prospect with anything but deep disquiet.
Arthur S. Eddington
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.
Winston Churchill
Twenty to twenty five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are … Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.
Samuel Johnson
It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must all and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Georges Clemenceau
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he is not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.
Benedict Spinoza
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it; and consequently so long is it impossible to him that he should do it.
John Davison Rockefeller
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection, and I am inclined to think that, with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods
Rabindranath Tagore
Men can only think. Women have a way of understanding without thinking. Woman was created out of Gods own fancy. Man, He had to hammer into shape.
Aeschylus
Justice shines in very smoky homes, and honors the righteous; but the gold-spangled mansions where the hands are unclean she leaves with eyes averted.
Aeschylus
Like a bad doctor who has fallen down sick you are cast down, and cannot find what sort of drugs would cure your ailment.
Maya Angelou
Stories of law violations are weighed on a different set of scales in the Black mind than in the white. Petty crimes embarrass the community and many people wistfully wonder why Negroes don’t rob more banks, embezzle more funds and employ graft in the unions…. This … appeals particularly to one who is unable to compete legally with his fellow citizens.”
Maya Angelou
Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I’ll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you’ll have to say, “Stop here until your mom comes here.” Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.”
Maya Angelou
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
We are not cave dwellers anymore, we live in the age of technology. When someone needs a car, he does not need to build it. He can buy it. When someone needs a murder, he himself does not need to kill. He can order it.
Maya Angelou
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
Raymond Chandler
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
Lewis H. Lapham
Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection, and I am inclined to think that, with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods”
Quotations
Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing … then it will be done, but not until then.
Jeanne Elium
A girl in the middle years also becomes more centered in her soul-life, the feelings of her heart, and she needs our guidance to learn to express her uniqueness, those small seeds that will someday sprout into gifts, talents, and resources.
Marvin Cohen
My friend devotes himself to his life, whenever he can find the spare time. His motto is: ‘Don’t just sit there: live!’ So he’s too busy to stand, to walk, to do anything, except to live. He even refused to kiss a girl, when invited, on the grounds that it was time again to be living. Schedules are sacred to him.
William Shakespeare
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troy an walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressida lay that night.
Spouse Love
Mahathi
Religions are springs of faith and divine nectar. Keep drinking that holy water but never spit on others.We need Religion till then, when religion automatically melts down and only God remains.
Basil Bunting
I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock- scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.
William Wordsworth
I am already kindly disposed towards you. My friendship it is not in my power to give: this is a gift which no man can make, it is not in our own power: a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive like a wildflower when these favor, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it.
Janice A Radway
I suspect a demand for real change in power relations will occur only if women … come to understand that their need for romances is a function of their dependent status as women and of their acceptance of marriage as the only route to female fulfillment. I think we as feminists might help this change along by first learning to recognize that romance reading originates in very real dissatisfaction and embodies a valid, if limited, protest. Then by developing strategies for making that dissatisfaction and its causes consciously available to romance readers and by learning how to encourage that protest in such a way that it will be delivered in the arena of actual social relations rather than acted out in the imagination, we might join hands with women who are, after all, our sisters and together imagine a world whose subsequent creation would lead to the need for a new fantasy altogether.
Northrop Frye
The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create “real people” so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung’s libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around the fringes. Certain elements of character are released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.
Denis De Rougemont
Romance feeds on obstacles, short excitation’s, and partings; marriage, on the contrary, is made up of wont, daily propinquity, growing accustomed to one another. Romance calls for “the faraway love” of the troubadours; marriage, for love of “one’s neighbor.” Where, then, a couple have married in obedience to a romance, it is natural that the first time a conflict of temperament or of taste becomes manifest the parties should ask themselves: “Why did I marry?” And it is no less natural that, obsessed by the universal propaganda in favor of romance, each should seize the first occasion to fall in love with somebody else.
Henry Seidel Canby
The great novels of sex of the nineteenth century were those of Thomas Hardy. By comparison, Lawrence’s books are more subtle and more revealing. Hardy was interested in the results of the sex impulses as they display themselves in normal life. Sex wrecks Jude; sex ennobles and ruins Tess. Lawrence is not much interested in results. When sex is triumphant in Alvina, the lost girl, the story ends. Her story is just beginning, but the only aspect that interested Lawrence has concluded. Sex in itself and for itself is his fascination, and if this makes him narrow it also makes him shrewd.
Rollo May
Sex can be defined fairly adequately in physiological terms as consisting of the building up of bodily tensions and their release. Eros, in contrast, is the experiencing of the personal intentions and meaning of the act. Whereas sex is a rhythm of stimulus and response, Eros is a state of being. The pleasure of sex is described by Freud and others as the reduction of tension; in Eros, on the contrary, we wish not to be released from the excitement but rather to hang on to it, to bask in it, and even to increase it. The end toward which sex points is gratification and relaxation, whereas Eros is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand.
Ellen Willis
There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereo typically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake, and stereo typically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration). Lovemaking cannot be totally classical unless it is also totally baroque, since you cannot abandon all restraints and so attain a classical intensity. In practice, however, most people are more inclined to one mode than to the other. A very classical person will be incompatible with a very baroque person unless each can bring out the other’s latent opposite side. Two people who are very one-sided in the same direction can be extremely compatible but risk missing a whole dimension of experience unless they get so deeply into one mode that it becomes the other.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Political life in our country has plowed in muddy channels, and needs the infusion of clearer and cleaner waters. I am not sure that women are naturally so much better than men that they will clear the stream by the virtue of their womanhood; it is not through sex but through character that the best influence of women upon the life of the nation must be exerted.
John Ruskin
Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst of them in reckless defiance; the plurality in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands.
John Ruskin
Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labor required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labor which its possessor will take in exchange for it.
John Ruskin
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrow for lost friends and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them, and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
Oscar Wilde
The liar, at any rate, recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Henry David Thoreau
The fable, which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful though strange as a wild-flower, is to the wise man an apothegm, and admits of his most generous interpretation.
Henry David Thoreau
The current of our thoughts made as sudden bends like the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points.
Henry David Thoreau
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!… What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring.
Max Planck
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up and is familiar with it.
Horace
The mind that is cheerful at present will have no solicitude for the future and will meet the bitter occurrences of life with a smile.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is a romantic business. it is painting a picture, not doing a sum but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question of how much fire you have in your belly.
Henry David Thoreau
It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.
Henry David Thoreau
It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.
Henry David Thoreau
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.
Samuel Ullman
Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks,red lips,and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life.
Yehoshua Shim’onai
Through common sense, you understand the basic things about life. And through faith, you know that there is One True God who authored these basic things. And also through faith, you understand that God works through both natural and supernatural ways to accomplish His wonderful plan.
YEHOSHUA SHIM’ONAI
I marvel at these two paradoxes that I recently realized; the first one perplexes me and the second one terrifies me:
– the first one is that even though God absolutely has no need of me, He does care for me in the richness of His grace;
– the second one is that even though I am totally dependent on His mercy, I despise Him in my sinfulness.
yehoshua shim’onai
I have once said that time is like a scroll that is still unrolling before man but is already completely spread out before its Creator; but I will revise this quote:
History is like a scroll that is still unrolling before man but is already completely spread out before its Author.
yehoshua shim’onai
Give me a thousand reasons to hate you and I will remind myself a thousand times about that one reason why I love you.
yehoshua shim’onai
No color, position, or activity can make a man more than a man. He is just a man; nothing more.
yehoshua shim’onai
I don’t look at a Christian by his theology. I look at him by how Christ has changed him from the inside out. I may not fully agree with his theology, but I will love him because he is my brother.
Virginia Woolf
Never did I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.
Virginia Woolf
If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
Cicero
I add this also, that natural ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue than education with out natural ability.
Andrew Carnegie
No amount of ability is the slightest avail with out honor.
Francis Bacon
Natural ablilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.
Abraham Lincoln
To you, more than to any others, the privilege is given, to assure that happiness [of saving the Union], and swell that grandeur, and to link your own names therewith forever.
