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Wikiquote:Quote of the day/November 2011

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November 1
 

Hasten slowly, and without losing heart,
Put your work twenty times upon the anvil.

~ Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux ~


 


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November 2
 

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self.

~ Lois McMaster Bujold ~

 


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November 3
 

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

~ André Malraux ~

 


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November 4
 

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, — knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

~ Wilfred Owen ~

 


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November 5

 

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded.
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

 


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November 6
 

If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.

~ Zig Ziglar ~

 


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November 7

 

Death is for a long time. Those of shallow thought say that it is forever. There is, at least, a long night of it. There is the forgetfulness and the loss of identity. The spirit, even as the body, is unstrung and burst and scattered. One goes down to death, and it leaves a mark on one forever.

~ R. A. Lafferty ~

 


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November 8
 

Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!


~ Bram Stoker ~

 


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November 9
 

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

~ Carl Sagan ~

 


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November 10

 

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

~ Neil Gaiman ~
in
American Gods

 


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November 11
 

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

~ Kurt Vonnegut ~

 


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November 12
 

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.

~ Joseph McCabe ~

 


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November 13
 

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

~ Augustine of Hippo ~

 


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November 14
 
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru ~
 


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November 15
 

We need not think alike to love alike.

~ Ferenc Dávid ~

 

Correction: This evidently seems to have been a misattribution to Ferenc Dávid which originated in the 1960s. ~ Kalki·· 23:38, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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November 16
 

Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.

~ Robert Nozick ~

 


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November 17

 

Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep it — keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard — keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means to have a Dominant Idea, which Circumstance cannot break. And such men make and unmake Circumstance.

~ Voltairine de Cleyre ~

 


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November 18
 

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

~ Alan Moore ~

 


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November 19
 

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.

~ James A. Garfield ~

 


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November 20
 

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

~ Benoît Mandelbrot ~

 


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November 21
 

I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards — or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer ~

 


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November 22
 

For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.

~ George Gissing ~

 


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November 23

 

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

~ John Milton ~
in
Areopagitica

 


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November 24

 

Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.

~ Baruch Spinoza ~








 


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November 25

 




Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate.

~ Upton Sinclair ~


 


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November 26
 

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

~ Eugène Ionesco ~

 


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November 27
 

Acting funny, but I don't know why,
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

~ Jimi Hendrix ~

 


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November 28
 

There stood a man with his sword drawn, and his face all over with blood. Then said Mr. Great-Heart, Who art thou? The man made answer, saying, I am one whose name is Valiant-for-truth. I am a pilgrim, and am going to the Celestial City.

~ John Bunyan ~

 


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November 29

 


It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

~ C. S. Lewis ~

 


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November 30
 



A sound heart is a safer guide than an ill-trained conscience.

~ Mark Twain ~

 


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Today is Monday, December 30, 2024; it is now 16:50 (UTC)