Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Quotes for the Day:

Do you really think one can be truly loving when one is short of bread?


Nothing is more wonderful, or honours virtue more, than the confidence with
which we turn to people whose probity we have long been acquainted with


One cannot reflect for long on moral precepts without being astonished at
seeing them, at one and the same time, revered and neglected, and without
wondering what could be the reason for this vagary of the human heart, whereby
it clings to principles of goodness and perfection from which it deviates in practice


Lying gets all the recompenses, then, while despair and
loneliness are the rewards of constancy and fidelity


Only experience or example can rationally determine which way the heart should incline.
Now experience is not an advantage that it is open to everyone to acquire, since it depends
on the various situations in which, by chance, we find ourselves. For many people, then,
this leaves only example that can offer any guidance as to how they should exercise virtue


How many deserters there are from the rigours of virtue, how few from the cause of love!


We should measure our wealth according to the means we have of satisfying our desires


Abbé Prévost (Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles)
French novelist, historian and journalist
(Born this day 1697)



The foolishness of the great and the wealthy is an excellent source of revenue for the humble

[Tamrin]

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election


Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied


Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best


When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that
you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice


A really great man is known by three signs: generosity in
the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success


To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making


The nation that has the schools has the future


Prince Otto von Bismarck, German chancellor
(Born this day 1815)



When you want to fool the world, tell the truth

[Tamrin]

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane


The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness


If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being,
then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life


If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was
a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up


Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motiv-
ation,could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs,
including the impulse to self-actualization and the love for the highest values


Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth


We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves,
but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves


Abraham Maslow
US psychologist (humanistic psychology)
(Born this day 1908)



He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail

[Tamrin]

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void.
His every act is conditioned by his time and his society


Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a for-
gotten ember, still smouldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red


Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction.
They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity


One strange feeling, which I remember clearly, was a powerful link with the
slain, particularly those that had fallen within the past hour or two. There was
so much death around that life seemed almost indecent. Some men’s uniforms
were soaked with gobs of blood. The ground was sodden with it. I killed, too


[Douglas MacArthur] He was a thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring
and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of me and the worst of men, the most protean,
most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore
a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flam-
ingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish
tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring
intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at arms- this nation has produced


Finally, she [Jackie] broke her silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley. Kneeling, John
Kennedy's personal physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand. "Another
dress?", he suggested diffidently. "No", she whispered fiercely, "Let them see the horror"


I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull
up tonight's darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace evermore


William Manchester
American author, biographer and historian
(Born this day 1922)



The sum of a million facts is not the truth

[Tamrin]

Necessity breeds solution


Step by step, moment by moment, we live through another day


A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable


Fight only in direst need not for lust or petty greed honor
those that do give birth respect them well for their full worth


The blackest night must end in dawn, the light dispel the dreamer's fear


Make no judgments where you have no compassion


Maybes never are


Anne McCaffrey
American fantasy and science fiction
(Born this day 1926)



Who wills, Can. Who tries, Does. Who loves, Lives

[Tamrin]

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly
how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea


The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting


Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule
if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight


Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought


Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary


Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings
grounded in the common baseness people see in one another


Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy


Milan Kundera
Czech-French novelist (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
(Born this day 1929)



I find myself fascinating

[Tamrin]

I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is
a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me


All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that
is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am
sure it's the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet — at least every-
body who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet


I kept stumbling and falling and stumbling and falling as I searched for the good. 'Why?'
I asked myself. Now I believe that I was on the right path all along, particularly with the
Green Belt Movement, but then others told me that I shouldn't have a career, that I shouldn't
raise my voice, that women are supposed to have a master. That I needed to be someone
else. Finally I was able to see that if I had a contribution I wanted to make, I must do it,
despite what others said. That I was OK the way I was. That it was all right to be strong


I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity
can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace


If you don’t raise your voice, then your environmentalism
means nothing; it’s mere tokenism or opportunism


Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make
it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking


As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our
home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing
among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing
they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later,
I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against
the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today,
over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which
is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to
restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder


Wangari Muta Maathai
Kenyan environmental and social activist
(2004 Nobel Peace Laureate)
(Born this day 1940)



The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education.
They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station

[Tamrin]

It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak.
Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind
of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings
clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind


Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors.
Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind… vividly, forcefully


The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal,
because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change


The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional
men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear


But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems.
Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and
spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it


Neurotics, proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte, take the lead. Jesus Christ,
bring up the rear. Simulate severe depression. Non-communicative with repressed hostility


Fire, slavery, cloth, coin, and stone - these are the basis of civilized life. Sometimes it happens
that one or another of them gets hopelessly involved in the most basic appetites of a woman
or a man. There are people I have met in my travels who cannot eat food unless it has been
held long over fire; and there are others, like me, who cannot love without some mark of
possession. Both, no doubt, seem squally strange and incomprehensible to you, 'ey, barbarian?


Samuel Delany
US science fiction writer
(Born this day 1942)



I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of
whatever race, assumed I was white... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function het-
erosexually. And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of
prizes... So, I thought, you are neither black nor white. You are neither male nor female. And you
are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer. There was something at once very satisfying and
very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revel-
ation — a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction

[Tamrin]

Families are the best place to learn and practice mutual tolerance and acceptance


The most powerful tool to lift families out of extreme poverty is to grant micro-loans to women


Micro-finance is a wonderful opportunity for businesses. By investing a small
portion of their income in micro-finance projects, they not only take an active
part in business ethics, but they also gain future business partners and consumers


Business is globalizing so fast that it has led to the often quoted ‘clash of
civilizations’. People simply have not had time to get to know and under-
stand people of other cultures sufficiently to live and work in harmony


If Western firms pay developing countries' suppliers' starvation wages in order to
feed the West's ever increasing consumer demand, can we call that ‘partnership’?


"Tolerance" is not only the acceptance that people, as diverse they may be, have the right
to be as they are and to live in peace together. Tolerance — in the context of business —
is also the recognition that to get what you want, you have to give something in return


Charity begins in your own family. “Charitable spirits” mustn’t forget to keep
their own slates clean, to address problems and inequities within their own four
walls with decency and fairness before trying to make the world a better place.
People who aren’t willing to do that are not sincere in their claim to benevolence


H.H. Princess Gabriele Inaara, LL.D
The Begum Aga Khan (wife of Aga Khan IV)
(Born this day 1963)



This "Clash of Civilizations" has led to a "Clash of Religions",
leading in turn to war, terror and extreme poverty