Wikiquote:Quote of the day/April 2012
They treat me like a fox, a cunning fellow of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to deal with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.
We avenge intellect when we dupe a fool, and it is a victory not to be despised.
~ Giacomo Casanova ~
I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.
~ Boss Tweed ~
Without music there can be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe itself is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.
O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.
~ Jesus ~
אלהי אלהי למא שבקתני
ελωι ελωι λεμα σαβαχθανι
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
~ Jesus ~
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.
~ Jesus ~
He would never take upon him the charge nor government of monks. For how shall I be able, said he, to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself: l If you think I have done you, or may hereafter do you any acceptable service, give me leave to found an abbey after my own mind and fancy.
Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight.
~ William Hazlitt ~
History is merely a list of surprises. ... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.
~ Kurt Vonnegut ~
Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being whoever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good.
~ Tom Clancy ~
A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.
~ Guy Fawkes ~
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
~ Thomas Hardy ~
This is the law: Every thing existing on the physical plane is an exteriorization of thought, which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought, and in accordance with that one’s responsibility, at the conjunction of time, condition, and place.
It is by acts, and not by ideas that people live.
~ Anatole France ~
It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
~ Thornton Wilder ~
If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man. I am quite certain that the more the question of crime and its treatment is studied the less faith men have in punishment.
~ Clarence Darrow ~
I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing — to be sharp, yet open.
~ Bernd Heinrich ~
Awakener, come!
Fling wide the gate of an eternal year,
The April of that glad new heavens and earth
Which shall grow out of these, as spring-tide grows
Slow out of winter's breast.
Let Thy wide hand
Gather us all — with none left out (O God!
Leave Thou out none!) from the east and from the west.
Loose Thou our burdens: heal our sicknesses;
Give us one heart, one tongue, one faith, one love.
In Thy great Oneness made complete and strong —
To do Thy work throughout the happy world —
Thy world, All-merciful, Thy perfect world.
~ Dinah Craik ~
Constant and frequent questioning is the first key to wisdom … For through doubting we are led to inquire, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.
~ Peter Abelard ~
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
~ Charles Mingus ~
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.
~ Max Planck ~
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.
Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason. All, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world.
~ Tertullian ~
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
~ Ulysses S. Grant ~
Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.
~ Terry Pratchett ~
The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
~ Henri Poincaré ~
I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where where ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.