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
Reply
Category Archives: Quotations
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.
Abraham Lincoln
Property is the fruit of labor—property is desirable—is a positive good in the world.
Rabindranath Tagore
If I cant make it through one door, Ill go through another door- or ill make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
Rabindranath Tagore
The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.
Rabindranath Tagore
The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
Rabindranath Tagore
The greed for fruit misses the flower.
Rabindranath Tagore
Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt
at being told that it is a fragment
awaiting perfection.
Rabindranath Tagore
Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress.
Rabindranath Tagore
Today I feel that I shall win through. I have come to the gateway of the simple; I am now content to see things as they are. I have gained freedom myself; I shall allow freedom to others. In my work will be my salvation.
Rabindranath Tagore
Let me not look for allies in lifes battlefield,But to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,But for the patience to win my freedom.
Rabindranath Tagore
Perhaps the new dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises; and then, unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost heritage.
Kate Millet
The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
Kate Millett
Stupid misery of fame and money. Always we were safe from it, mistaking our obscurity for a curse when it was a treasure. Free to make what we liked, to be ourselves, even do nothing at all. No one watching. We could be real.
Kate Millett
The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.
Kate Millett
A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.
Kate Millett
The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.
Kate Millett
Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.
Kate Millett
It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.
Abraham Lincoln
Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much
Abaraham Lincoln
Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation.
Abraham Lincoln
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
Abraham Lincoln
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good.
