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Wikiquote:Quote of the day/August 2011

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August 1
 

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

~ Herman Melville ~
in
The Confidence-Man


 


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August 2
 

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

~ John Tyndall ~


 


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August 3

 

Much of what we see in the universe … starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

~ Clifford D. Simak ~

 


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August 4
 

I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

~ Barack Obama ~

 


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August 5
 
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.

~ Wendell Berry ~

 


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August 6

 

Like an Aeolian harp that wakes
No certain air, but overtakes
Far thought with music that it makes:

Such seem'd the whisper at my side:
"What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?" I cried.
"A hidden hope," the voice replied:

So heavenly-toned, that in that hour
From out my sullen heart a power
Broke, like the rainbow from the shower,

To feel, altho' no tongue can prove
That every cloud, that spreads above
And veileth love, itself is love.

~ Alfred Tennyson ~
in
The Two Voices

 


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August 7
  Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives.

~ Jimmy Wales ~

 


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August 8

 

Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten —
These were the same for Sappho as for me.

Two thousand years — much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men —
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.

~ Sara Teasdale ~

 


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August 9
 

When the rain came down — I was standing in the green
My soul was touched by every tree that my eyes could see
I am in peace, in love, in harmony — when the rain comes
down

When the rain came down — melded with my tears
When the rain came down — flow away the fears
When the rain came down — bigger than the sea
When the rain came down — then came me.

~ Happy Rhodes ~


 


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August 10
 

What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.

~ Andrew Sullivan ~

 


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August 11
 

Standing in the presence of the Unknown, all have the same right to think, and all are equally interested in the great questions of origin and destiny. All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth.
I do not claim that I have floated level with the heights of thought, or that I have descended to the very depths of things. I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber. That is all.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll
V28N5H
 


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August 12
 

How can we escape from the trap that the terrorists have set us? Only by recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war. We must, of course, protect our security; but we must also correct the grievances on which terrorism feeds. Crime requires police work, not military action.

~ George Soros ~

 


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August 13
 

It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.

~ Felix Adler ~

 


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August 14
 

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.

~ John Galsworthy ~

 


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August 15
 

True spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.

~ Sri Aurobindo ~

 


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August 16
  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 ~

 


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August 17
 

I have never knew what it was to sacrifice my own judgment to gratify any party and I have no doubt of the time being close at hand when I will be rewarded for letting my tongue speak what my heart thinks. I have suffered myself to be politically sacrificed to save my country from ruin and disgrace and if I am never again elected I will have the gratification to know that I have done my duty.

~ Davy Crockett ~

 


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August 18
 

I ask no more from mortals
Than your beautiful face implies,—
The beauty the artist beholding
Interprets and sanctifies.
Who says that men have fallen,
That life is wretched and rough?
I say, the world is lovely,
And that loveliness is enough.

~ Robert Williams Buchanan ~

 


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August 19
 

The person who will bear much shall have much to bear, all the world through.

~ Samuel Richardson ~

 


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August 20
 

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

~ H. P. Lovecraft ~

 


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August 21
 

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.


~ Leon Trotsky ~

 


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August 22
 

Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.


- Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury ~

 


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August 23

 

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful
We have indeed revealed this (Message) in the Night of Power:
And what will explain to thee what the night of power is?
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
Therein come down the angels and the Spirit by God's permission, on every errand:
Peace!...This until the rise of morn!
~ Al-Qur'an ~
Sura 97 : Al-Qadr
as translated by
Abdullah Yusuf Ali

 


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August 24

 

Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.

~ Jorge Luis Borges ~

 


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August 25
 

We live in a world we ourselves create.

~ Johann Gottfried Herder ~

 


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August 26
 
Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.

~ Mother Teresa ~

 


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August 27
 

There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them. This is an opportunity! Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point. The future revolves around you, here, now, so do good!

~ The Doctor ~
in
Doctor Who : Cold Blood

 


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August 28
 

Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~

 


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August 29
 

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.


~ John Locke ~

 


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August 30
 


The Muslim Anarchist Charter rejects absolutely:
all forms of violence and political coercion;
all forms of racism and prejudice, including Islamophobia, homophobia and neurelitism.

~ Yakoub Islam ~

 


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August 31
 

At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.

~ William Saroyan ~

 


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Today is Wednesday, December 11, 2024; it is now 23:19 (UTC)