Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

The Night has a thousand eyes, and the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun


The mind has a thousand eyes, and the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies when love is done


I buoyed me on the wings of dream, above the world of sense;
I set my thought to sound the scheme, and fathom the Immense


As strong, as deep, as wide as is the sea, though by the wind made restless as the wind,
by billows fretted and by rocks confined, so strong, so deep, so wide my love for thee


So my great love for thee lies tranquil, deep, forever; though above it passions fierce,
ambition, hatred, jealousy; like waves that seem from earth’s core to the sky to leap,
but ocean’s depths can never really pierce; Hide its great calm, while all the surface raves


Slowly the joy of flower and bird did like a tide withdraw;
And in the heaven a silent star smiled on me, infinitely far


I walk as one unclothed of flesh, I wash my spirit clean;
I see old miracles afresh, and wonders yet unseen


Francis Bourdillon
English poet and translator
(Born this day 1852)



Yet came there never voice nor sign; But through my being stole sense of a Universe divine,
and knowledge of a soul perfected in the joy of things, the star, the flower, the bird that sings.
Nor I am more, nor less, than these; All are one brotherhood; I and all creatures, plants, and
trees, the living limbs of God; And in an hour, as this, divine, I feel the vast pulse throb in mine

[Tamrin]

Heaven, they say, protects children, sailors, and drunken men; and what-
ever answers to Heaven in the academical system protects freshmen


Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better
Of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education


There isn't such a reasonable fellow in the world, to hear him talk. He never wants any-
thing but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's
everything that he wants and nothing that you want. And that's his idea of a compromise


Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God's
best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out
of one's self and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another


Christ's whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness — the setting forth
in living act and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of
God — one long campaign in which the "temptation" stands out as the first great battle and victory


Remember there's always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere if you'll only listen for it


From behind the shadow of the still small voice — more awful than tempest or earth-
quake — more sure and persistent than day and night — is always sounding full of hope
and strength to the weariest of us all, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world"


Thomas Hughes
English lawyer and novelist (Tom Brown’s School Days)
(Died this day 1896)



He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world

[Tamrin]

Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world
about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of
their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race,
their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say,
"This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow”


I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something
to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of
the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen


For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography,
and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time


Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time
in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to
those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one
doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else


Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write
about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place


Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and
it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone


The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for


Louis L'Amour
American author (Westerns)
(Born this day 1908)



There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning

[Tamrin]

Silence is like a flame, you see?


Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?


Mime makes the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible


To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man


I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black back-
grounds, so that man’s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth...
I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish


Fathers, I do not practice. I’m not religious in life, but when I perform "The Creation of the World"
and when my soul is touched by the confrontation of "Good and Evil", then God enters in me


In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people


Marcel Marceau
French mime artist (Bip the Clown)
(Born this day 1923)



Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop

[Tamrin]

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another


Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony
of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends


Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it


If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable


When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social
class in America,"... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging
the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals"


Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them
to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles


The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class


Prof. Paul Fussell
American cultural and literary historian
(Born this day 1924)



Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our
proletarian moment. ... The explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which
has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been
discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity ...
If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves
toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates

[Tamrin]

Romanticism believed that human nature is innately good, and should therefore be encouraged to
take its natural course, unspoiled by the artificial impositions of social prejudice and convention.
Second, Romanticism concluded that a child is neither a scaled-down, ignorant version of the
adult nor a formless piece of clay in need of molding, rather, the child is a special being in its own
right with unique, trustworthy impulses that should be allowed to develop and run their course


Differences in reading ability between five-year olds and eight-year olds are caused
primarily by the older children's possessing more knowledge, not by the differ-
ences in their memory capacities, reasoning abilities, or control of eye movements


Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us
assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of
atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system.
She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the
class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out.
'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay
down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school?


If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students
are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic
structure, the hapless five — they are most likely to be poor or minority students — are
bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation


Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to
place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly
shared information between generations and between young people themselves


We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when
our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background
knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else


We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education. We ignore the air
we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse


Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr.
American educator and academic literary critic
(Born this day 1928)



The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to
all other fundamental improvements in American education

[Tamrin]

People call me an enlightened man — I detest that term —
they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning


I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize — that's the
realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a
thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in
the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize —
and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you


If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you.
Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place


Our mind (and there are no individual minds — only "mind", which is the accumulation
of man's knowledge and experience) has created the notion of the psyche and evolution


To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with
that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away
from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a “Natural Man”


We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the
flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood


You think when you don't want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative
to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don't think!


U.G. Krishnamurti (unrelated to Jiddu Krishnamurti)
Indian philosopher, (anti-guru)
(Died this day 2007)



Dont follow me, I’m lost

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Sunday’s Quotes:

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim
must be proportioned to its strangeness


What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense


Life's most important questions are,
for the most part, nothing but probability problems


Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration


All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical
consequences of a small number of immutable laws


The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and
in the same manner that the sense of feeling corrects
the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former


Napoleon: “You have written this huge book on the system
of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe.”
Laplace: “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis”


Bro. Pierre-Simon Laplace
French mathematician, astronomer and physicist
(Born this day 1749)



Man follows only phantoms

(last words)

[Tamrin]

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all


If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured


The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly


It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now


Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness


All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few


God's only excuse is that he does not exist


Bro. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
French author (Lamiel)
(Died this day 1842)



One can acquire everything in solitude — except character