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August 16

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
2005
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. ~ T. E. Lawrence (born 16 August 1888)
2006
The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action. ~ Winston Churchill (said about T. E. Lawrence, born 16 August 1888)
2007
The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander. ~ T. E. Lawrence
2008
It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not. ~ Jean de La Bruyère
2009
Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practising the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex. ~ T. E. Lawrence
2010
Some men, like a tiled house, are long before they take fire, but once on flame there is no coming near to quench them. ~ Thomas Fuller (date of death)
2011
From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race. ~ Jean de La Bruyère
2012
Rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it:
~ T. E. Lawrence ~
2013
Liberality consists less in giving a great deal than in gifts well timed.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2014
That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further: it is heroic, it is perfect.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2015
True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2016
It is a sad thing when men have neither enough intelligence to speak well, nor enough sense to hold their tongues; this is the root of all impertinence.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2017
Lofty posts make great men greater still, and small men much smaller.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2018
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
2019
As it is always darkest just before the day dawneth, so God useth to visit His servants with greatest afflictions when he intendeth their speedy advancement.
~ Thomas Fuller ~
2020
I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
~ T. E. Lawrence ~
2021
An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
in
~ Les Caractères ~
2022
Take heed of doing irrevocable acts in thy passion, As the revealing of secrets, which makes thee a bankrupt for society ever after: neither do such things which done once are done for ever, so that no bemoaning can amend them. Sampsons hair grew again, but not his eyes: Time may restore some losses, others are never to be repaird. Wherefore in thy rage make no Persian decree which cannot be revers'd or repeald; but rather Polonian laws which (they say) last but three dayes: Do not in an instant what an age cannot recompence.
~ Thomas Fuller ~
2023
Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.
~ The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. ~
  • proposed by Kalki; recent noteworthy legal proceedings.
2024
Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.
~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
in
~ Les Caractères ~
2025
I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals.
~ Charles Bukowski ~
2026
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America: It's like Britain, only with buttons. ~ Ringo Starr, joined The Beatles that day.

We come too late to say anything which has not been said already. ~ Jean de La Bruyère

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind. ~ Thomas Fuller (date of death)

Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool. ~ George Galloway

The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. ~ T. E. Lawrence

To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail. ~ T. E. Lawrence

We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together. ~ Jean de La Bruyère

Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour's occupying you is greater than the profit.
~ T. E. Lawrence ~
Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its products among others for private benefit.
~ T. E. Lawrence ~
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
~ T. E. Lawrence ~
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
~ Charles Bukowski ~
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.
~ Charles Bukowski ~
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.
~ Charles Bukowski ~
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
~ Charles Bukowski ~


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