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Post by Tamrin on Dec 4, 2010 9:48:59 GMT 10
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide
Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day
All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it
Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimesSamuel ButlerEnglish satirical novelist (Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh) (Born this day 1835) It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 4, 2010 9:51:47 GMT 10
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution
It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the countryHannah Arendt, German/US sociologist (Died this day 1975) The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:11:11 GMT 10
Quotes for the Day:Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpoints to hack post-horses
When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly
Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream
My subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and define, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statute, at a glance
One must not make oneself cheap here — that is a cardinal point — or else one is done. Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance
To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop
I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelingsBro. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart(Born this day 1791) Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:13:48 GMT 10
My heart is like a singing bird
Love came down at Christmas; love all lovely, love divine; love was born at Christmas, stars and angels gave the sign
I might show facts as plain as day: But since your eyes are blind, you'd say, "Where? What?" and turn away
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads the wind is passing by
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun
Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend
The downhill path is easy, but there's no turning backChristina Rossetti, English poet (Born this day 1830) Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:16:42 GMT 10
Nothing succeeds like success
All generalizations are dangerous, even this one
I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it
It is almost as difficult to keep a first class person in a fourth class job, as it is to keep a fourth class person in a first class job
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it
All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hopeBro. Alexandre Dumas(Died this day 1870) All for one and one for all
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:21:32 GMT 10
A man should never neglect his family for business
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained
It's kind of fun to do the impossibleWalt Disney, DeMolay Brother (Born this day 1901) Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:24:48 GMT 10
Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language
Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding." Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality
Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the objectWerner HeisenbergGerman physicist (Uncertainty Principle, Nobel 1932) (Born this day 1901) Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it — more correctly — the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2010 9:27:29 GMT 10
We tell ourselves stories in order to live
Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self respect springs
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self- respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, singular power of self-respect
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dreamJoan Didion, American journalist and novelist (Born this day 1934) I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 6, 2010 12:27:24 GMT 10
Quotes for the Day:There will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason; but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it has held its own from the beginning of the world — how neither sense nor reason has been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense
The position which believers and unbelievers occupy with regard to their various forms of faith is very much the same all over the world. The difficulties which trouble us, have troubled the hearts and minds of men as far back as we can trace the beginnings of religious life. The great problems touching the relation of the Finite to the Infinite, of the human mind as the recipient, and of the Divine Spirit as the source of truth, are old problems indeed
He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one
It is necessary that we too should see the beam in our own eyes, and learn to distinguish between the Christianity of the nineteenth century and the religion of Christ
Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states
If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism, that no religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its founder and its first apostles
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to IndiaMax Müller, German Orientalist (Born this day 1823) When a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 6, 2010 12:32:31 GMT 10
There are certain truths about the universe and its constitution - as distinct from the particular things in it that come before our observation - which can- not be grasped by human reason or expressed in precise words: but they can be apprehended by some people at least, in a semi-mystical experience, called ecstasy, and a work of art is great insofar as this experience is caught and expressed in it. Because, however, the truths concerned transcend a language attuned to the description of material objects, the expression can only be through hieroglyphics, and it is of such hieroglyphics that literature consists
We are all the kindred of the mystics. ..Strange and far away from us though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only but also to the society that brought it forth;... the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also... our guarantee of the end to which immanent love, the hidden steersman... is moving... us on the path toward the Real
I do not at all like this craving for absolute certainty that this or that experience of yours, is what it seems to yourself. And I am assuredly not going to declare that I am absolutely certain of the final and evidential worth of any of those experiences. They are not articles of faith
We have not fulfilled our destiny when we have sat down at a safe distance from it, purring like overfed cats, 'suffering is the ancient law of love' — and its highest pleasure into the bargain, oddly enough... A sponge cake and milk religion is neither true to this world nor to the next
In my lucid moments I see only too clearly that the only possible end of this road is complete, unconditional self-consecration, and for this I have not the nerve, the character or the depth. There has been some sort of mistake My soul is too small for it and yet it is at bottom the only thing that I really want. It feels sometimes as if, whilst still a jumble of conflicting impulses and violent faults I were being pushed from behind towards an edge I dare not jump over
After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life
We must cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them and refrain from claiming anything for our ownEvelyn Underhill, English mystic & poet (Born this day 1875) All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love
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