Wikiquote:Quote of the day/May 2008
QOTD : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December
Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 20:26 (UTC)
- May 1
| What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul. ~ Joseph Addison |  |
- May 2
| Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. ~ Novalis |  |
- May 3
| The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. ~ Niccolò Machiavelli |  |
- May 4
| A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron. ~ Horace Mann |  |
- May 5
| If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't ventured at all, who helps me then? ~ Søren Kierkegaard |  |
- May 6
| Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. ~ Sigmund Freud |
- May 7
| If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons. ~ David Hume |  |
- May 8
| Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. ~ Friedrich Hayek |
- May 9
| Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. ~ J. M. Barrie |  |
- May 10
We're one, but we're not the same ~ Bono ~ |
 |
- May 11
| Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. ~ Richard Feynman |  |
- May 12
| I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself. ~ Florence Nightingale |  |
- May 13
| Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty. ~ Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light |  |
- May 14
| Errors now almost universally exist, and must be overcome solely by the force of reason; and as reason, to effect the most beneficial purposes, makes her advance by slow degrees, and progressively substantiates one truth of high import after another, it will be evident, to minds of comprehensive and accurate thought, that by these and similar compromises alone can success be rationally expected in practice. For such compromises bring truth and error before the public; and whenever they are fairly exhibited together, truth must ultimately prevail. ~ Robert Owen |  |
- May 15
| Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory. ~ Irena Sendler |  |
- May 16
| Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear. ~ Marcus Aurelius |  |
- May 17
| I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious statues of Right and Duty. ~ Henri Barbusse |  |
- May 18
| To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. ~ Bertrand Russell |  |
- May 19
| Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness. ~ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk |
- May 20
| The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~ John Stuart Mill |  |
- May 21
The flying Rumours gather'd as they roll'd, ~ Alexander Pope ~ |
 |
- May 22
| Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle |  |
- May 23
| Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering–pot and pruning–knife. ~ Margaret Fuller |  |
- May 24
| Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. ~ William Whewell |  |
- May 25
| Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. ~ Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy |  |
- May 26
| Thunder only happens when it's raining. Players only love you when they're playing. Say... Women... they will come and they will go. When the rain washes you clean... you'll know. ~ Stevie Nicks ~ |
 |
- May 27
| Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. ~ Harlan Ellison |  |
- May 28
| In my books I have lifted bits from various religions in trying to come to a better understanding; I've made use of religious themes and symbols. Now, as the world becomes more pagan, one has to lead people in the same direction in a different way... ~ Patrick White |  |
- May 29
| Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. ~ John F. Kennedy |
- May 30
| By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. ~ Mikhail Bakunin |  |
- May 31
Be composed — be at ease with me — I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, ~ Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass ~ |
 |
QOTD : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December
Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 20:26 (UTC)