Wikiquote:Quote of the day/June 2018

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June 1

The mind is formed by the knowledge and the direction of ideas it receives and the guidance it is given. Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.

~ Carl von Clausewitz ~

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June 2

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

~ Thomas Hardy ~

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June 3

The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior.

~ Sydney Smith ~

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June 4

I don't think the thing is to be well known, but being worth knowing.

~ Robert Fulghum ~

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June 5

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

~ Robert F. Kennedy ~

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June 6

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

~ William Ralph Inge ~

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June 7

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks ~

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June 8

Always Postpone Meetings with Time-wasting Morons

~ Scott Adams ~

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June 9

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

~ Anthony Bourdain ~

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June 10

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

~ Saul Bellow ~

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June 11

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, “the blues” which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.

~ William Styron ~

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June 12

We're all alive, but we don't know why or what for; we're all searching for happiness; we're all leading lives that are different and yet the same.

~ Anne Frank ~

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June 13

I'm nothing,
I'll always be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dreams inside me.

~ Fernando Pessoa ~

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June 14

Our country is a mess right now and we don't have time to pretend otherwise. We don't have time to waste on being politically correct.

~ Donald Trump ~

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June 15

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.
This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern.

~ Mario Cuomo ~

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June 16

Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

~ Joyce Carol Oates ~

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June 17

Most men are difficult to buy presents for. Last year I gave up and handed my father a hundred dollars and said, "Just buy yourself something that will make your life easier." He went out and bought a gift for my mother.

~ Rita Rudner ~

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June 18

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”

~ Roger Ebert ~

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June 19

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

~ Blaise Pascal ~

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June 20

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber can believe in an unprejudiced point of view.

~ Lillian Hellman ~

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June 21

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr ~

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June 22

One sole God;
One sole ruler, — his Law;
One sole interpreter of that law — Humanity.

~ Giuseppe Mazzini ~

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June 23

I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.
I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.

~ Charles Krauthammer ~

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June 24

When, O crowned Jesus; when, O loving Saviour; when, O patient and just Judge — when wilt Thou come forth from Thy hiding, and change tears to smiles, and groans to joys? When shall that choral song burst forth, sweeping through the air, and circling about Thy throne, which shall proclaim the redemption of the world to the Lord God?

~ Henry Ward Beecher ~

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June 25

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough — to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

~ Anthony Bourdain ~

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June 26

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic "feeling" about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes "pick up" accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

~ Colin Wilson ~

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June 27

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

~ Emma Goldman ~

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June 28

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ~

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June 29

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

~ Antoine de Saint Exupéry ~

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June 30

Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only
Of the loneliness of the dying,
Of how, when Giordano
Climbed to his burning
There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.

~ Czesław Miłosz ~

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Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 12:50 (UTC)