Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

Are you the new person drawn toward me?


From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines


Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul


Keep your face always toward the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you


I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars


I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best


I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends


Walt Whitman
American poet, essayist and journalist
(Died this day 1892)



Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself;
I am large — I contain multitudes

[Tamrin]

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself


Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again


My favourite definition of a religion is a misinterpretation of mythology


Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when
understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own
metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble


God is a metaphor for that which transcends all
levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that


Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.
The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.
Being alive is the meaning


Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you
your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use
of the system to the attainment of human purposes?


Prof. Joseph Campbell
American mythologist (Mythic Image)
(Born this day 1904)



Follow your bliss and the universe
will open doors where there were only walls

[Tamrin]

Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by
answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible


Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power
to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom


Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake


We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through
the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may
have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be
taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose
one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way


Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of
human existence is he truly human or does he become his true self. He
becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by
forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward


For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and
from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in
general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment


What is to give light must endure burning


Viktor Emil Frankl
Austrian pyschiatrist (Man's Search for Meaning)
(Born this day 1905)



I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented
by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast

[Tamrin]

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe
in the dignity and importance of the question


All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them,
are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent


Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person
puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person


If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't
regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed


There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a
little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than
malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts


The most dangerous word in any human tongue
is the word for brother. It's inflammatory


I have always depended on the kindness of strangers


Tennessee Williams
American dramatist (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
(Born this day 1911)



The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

[Tamrin]

I am against religion because it teaches us to
be satisfied with not understanding the world


We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity
has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further


Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate
evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence


Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to
forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear,
if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven


What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?
When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and
is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?


The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know
of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity


There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you
can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?


Prof. Richard Dawkins, FRS
Kenyan-born British biologist (The Selfish Gene)
(Born this day 1941)



We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural trans-
mission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a mono-
syllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate
mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related
to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'

[Tamrin]

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s
nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may
be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life
in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame


No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have
to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks


Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights.
Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood


Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is every-
thing it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.
It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more


I have accepted fear as a part of life — specifically the fear of change ...
I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back


Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness


Singularity shows something wrong in the mind


Erica Jong
American teacher and feminist author
(Born this day 1942)



Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own

[Tamrin]

The higher the building the lower the morals


I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second


My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have
an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough


I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me


It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit


Never mind, dear, we're all made the same, though some more than others


I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise


Noël Coward
English playwright (Private Letters)
(Died this day 1973)



Just say the lines and don't trip over the furniture

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Thursday’s Quotes:

I will govern according to the common weal,
but not according to the common will


The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for
kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon
God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods


That which concerns the mystery of the King's power is not lawful to be
disputed; for that is to wade into the weakness of Princes, and to take away
the mystical reverence that belongs unto them that sit in the throne of God


If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agreeth as well with
monarchy, as God and the devil — No bishop, no King!


I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother church, although
defiled with some infirmities and corruptions...Let [the Papists] assure
themselves, that, as I am a friend of their persons, if they be good subjects,
so am I a vowed enemy, and do denounce mortal war to their errors


I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman


Were I not a king, I would be a university man


Bro. King James Stuart
James I of England and Ireland (VI of Scotland)
(Died this day 1625)



Portrait by Daniel Mytens, 1621

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain,
dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest
resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless
(smoking tobacco)

[Tamrin]

I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters
in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words


But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure
poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity


From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus,
because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature,
which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own


We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two
needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a
common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous


Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis
fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?


One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the
double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches
us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact


The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperish-
able out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds


Alfred de Vigny
French musketeer, poet, playwright, and novelist
(Born this day 1797)



Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things
I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way
I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing