Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

2 of 2

All human nature vigorously resists grace because
grace changes us and the change is painful


At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst,
an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily


Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain
merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute


Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will
not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing


I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly
Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted


Only if we are secure in our beliefs can
we see the comical side of the universe


I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing


Flannery O'Connor
(Born this day 1925)



I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say

[Tamrin]

1 of 2

Evil is obvious only in retrospect


The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off


A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space


The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary


I have yet to hear a man ask for advice
on how to combine marriage and a career


From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence -
and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified


Men should think twice before making
widowhood woman's only path to power


Gloria Steinem
American feminist and publisher (Ms Magazine)
(Born this day 1934)



A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle

[Tamrin]

2 of 2

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions.
Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back


Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't,
destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it


If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say,
I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society


This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are
easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human
beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this
system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles
other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism


Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered
in women of all races, and in black and other minority men


Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan
for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days


Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality


Gloria Steinem
(Born this day 1934)



A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual

[Tamrin]

Revolution begins with the self, in the self


The purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible


Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't
keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there


We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It’s about as real a smile
as girls can do for each other, considering we don’t practice real smiling every day,
you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead
of something honest and worthy of respect … you know… like being people


I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is.
I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it


When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in
the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did


The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality


Prof. Toni Cade Bambara
African-American author, documentary film-maker and social activist
(Born this day 1939)



The most effective way to do it, is to do it

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Wednesday's Quotes:

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup


Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual


Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge
which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend


Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus
who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken


Then let us all do what is right, strive with all our might toward the unattainable,
develop as fully as we can the gifts God has given us, and never stop learning


The barriers are not erected which can say to
aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther'


What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself.
There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven


Bro. Ludwig van Beethoven
German composer and pianist
(Died this day 1827)



Applaud friends, the comedy is over

(Said as he was dying)

[Tamrin]

Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition,
of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than
this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt.
What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was
more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous


When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of
that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic
fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when,
above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private
judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with
an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority


When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power,
She soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had
formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive
laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics


Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter
whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result


Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed
at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities


And when we read the nature of these tortures, which were worthy of an
oriental imagination when we remember that they were inflicted, for the most
part, on old and feeble and half-doting women, it is difficult to repress a feeling
of the deepest abhorrence for those men who caused and who encouraged them


The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in
the history of the human mind ... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and
deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the
mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the uni-
versities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial inde-
pendence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin


W.E.H. Lecky, Anglo-Irish historian
(Born this day 1838)



Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and
grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers

[Tamrin]

Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,
am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.
Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else.
Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!


There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society
so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly
support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment
that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support
becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations
and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule


Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast
industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity
of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support


Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point
of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the
imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a
yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward
from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization
only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos


Their misery came with all your other miseries, from that incapacity for cooper-
ation which followed from the individualism on which your social system was
founded, from your inability to perceive that you could make ten times more
profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than by contending with them


If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second


The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual


Edward Bellamy
American author and socialist
(Born this day 1850)



I should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the
brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our
thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity

[Tamrin]

When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas but not your heart away"


The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall


Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out;
but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time


The difference between an icicle and a red-hot poker is really much
slighter than the difference between truth and falsehood or sense and
nonsense; yet it is much more immediately noticeable and much more
universally noticed, because the body is more sensitive than the mind


A man who possesses common sense and the use of reason must not expect
to learn from treatises or lectures on textual criticism anything that he could
not, with leisure and industry, find out for himself. What the lectures and
treatises can do for him is to save him time and trouble by presenting to him
immediately considerations which would in any case occur to him sooner or later


Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out
... and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure


Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair


A.E. Housman
English poet and classical scholar (A Shropshire Lad)
Born this day 1859)



Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain

[Tamrin]

I'm not a teacher, but an awakener


Education is hanging around until you've caught on


If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom


We dance around the ring and suppose,
but the secret sits in the middle and knows


The best way out is always through


Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference


In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on


Robert Frost
American poet (Mending Wall, Road Not Taken)
(Born this day 1874)



I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world