Wikiquote:Quote of the day/January 2013
QOTD by month + Suggestions for: January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December
Today is Saturday, December 21, 2024; it is now 18:06 (UTC)
| You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. |
| ~ E. M. Forster ~ |
| Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. |
| ~ Isaac Asimov ~ |
| We must not say every mistake is a foolish one. |
| ~ Cicero ~ |
| Godliness consists in the knowledge love & worship of God, Humanity in love, righteousness & good offices towards man. |
| ~ Isaac Newton ~ |
| Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do. |
| ~ Umberto Eco ~ |
| When no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies. |
| ~ Alan Watts ~ |
| The whole country is full of enterprise. Our common schools are diffusing intelligence among the people and our industry is fast accumulating the comforts and luxuries of life. ... It is not strange, however much it may be regretted, that such an exuberance of enterprise should cause some individuals to mistake change for progress and the invasion of the rights of others for national prowess and glory. |
| ~ Millard Fillmore ~ |
| There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to "social peace," though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force. |
| ~ A. J. Muste ~ |
| Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom. |
| ~ Simone de Beauvoir ~ |
| It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. |
| ~ John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton ~ |
| We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided. |
| ~ Alexander Hamilton ~ |
| Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. |
| ~ Edmund Burke ~ |
| Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to "learn." What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remember the saying "Know thyself." |
| ~ G. I. Gurdjieff ~ |
| I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late. |
| ~ Albert Schweitzer ~ |
| Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. |
| ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~ |
| We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. |
| ~ Susan Sontag ~ |
| Mankind naturally and generally love to be flatter'd: Whatever sooths our Pride, and tends to exalt our Species above the rest of the Creation, we are pleas'd with and easily believe, when ungrateful Truths shall be with the utmost Indignation rejected. "What! bring ourselves down to an Equality with the Beasts of the Field! with the meanest part of the Creation! 'Tis insufferable!" But, (to use a Piece of common Sense) our Geese are but Geese tho' we may think 'em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho' it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful. |
| ~ Benjamin Franklin ~ |
| The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles. |
| ~ Robert Anton Wilson ~ |
| By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule — From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE — out of TIME. |
| ~ Edgar Allan Poe ~ |
| Lord — Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will. |
| ~ Barack Obama ~ |
| We know our time on this Earth is fleeting. We know that we will each have our share of pleasure and pain, that even after we chase after some earthly goal, whether it’s wealth or power or fame or just simple comfort, we will, in some fashion, fall short of what we had hoped. We know that, no matter how good our intentions, we’ll all stumble sometimes in some way. We’ll make mistakes, we’ll experience hardships and even when we’re trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern God’s heavenly plans. There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true. |
| ~ Barack Obama ~ |
| Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule. |
| ~ Francis Bacon ~ |
| I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered. And besides, good society usurps its privileges. It had in the past the privilege of judging what was proper, but now that it supposes itself to be attacked, it condemns not what is coarse and disagreeable without compensation, but what it thinks harmful to its interest. |
| ~ Stendhal ~ |
| I'm searching for a heart, Searching everyone. They say love conquers all. You can't start it like a car, You can't stop it with a gun. |
| ~ Warren Zevon ~ |
Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, A prince can mak a belted knight, Then let us pray that come it may, |
| ~ Robert Burns ~ |
| Beauty in this Iron Age must turn From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn Who hopes to wake the Future to arise In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes Of selfishness and lust have stained our days. |
| ~ Philip José Farmer ~ |
| Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life — that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' — but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man — and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning! |
| ~ Lewis Carroll ~ |
| To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. |
| ~ Colette ~ |
| Angels never attack, as infernal spirits do. Angels only ward off and defend. |
| ~ Emanuel Swedenborg ~ |
| Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living. |
| ~ Gregory Benford ~ |
| Everything is literally entangled, it can all be communicated with and affected "at a distance" because there is no distance, only a simulation of apparent separation which our limited consciousness feeds us second by second at 11 bits. The "telepathy" which brings people together is no more or less supernatural or unlikely than the "telepathy" which brings two of your fingers together when you think about it. Patience, participation and constant close observation of what's going on, on the inside and on the outside will soon make you a fine sorcerer, if that's what you want to be. |
| ~ Grant Morrison ~ |
QOTD by month + Suggestions for: January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December
Today is Saturday, December 21, 2024; it is now 18:06 (UTC)