Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

Tuesday’s Quotes:

Let us rejoice, O my Beloved! Let us go forth to see ourselves in
Thy beauty, To the mountain and the hill, Where the pure water flows


Upon a darkened night the flame of love was burning in my breast


One human thought alone is worth more than the entire world,
hence God alone is worthy of it


God is pleased with nothing but love ... All our works, and all our
labours, how grand soever they may be, are nothing in the sight of God


All the powers of soul and body, memory, understanding, and will, interior
and exterior senses, the desires of spirit and of sense, all work in and by love


There is nothing better or more necessary than love


In a word, it is for this love that we are all created


Saint John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz)
Spanish Carmelite mystic and poet
(Born this day 1542)



All I do is done in love; all I suffer, I suffer in the sweetness of love

[Tamrin]

Never confuse motion with action


He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else


We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid


Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools
that have not the wits enough to be honest


How few there are who have courage enough to
own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them


Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do


When you're finished changing, you're finished


MW Bro. Benjamin Franklin
American statesman and polymath
(Installed as Grand Master of what would be known as the
‘Moderns’ Grand Lodge in Pennsylvania, this St. John's Day 1734)



When in doubt, don't

[Tamrin]

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next


Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages


Never forget what a person says to you when they are angry


When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung


All ambitions are lawful except those that climb
upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind


Children are unpredictable. You never know what
inconsistency they are going to catch you in next


The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government


Henry Ward Beecher
American clergyman, abolitionist and orator (The Independent)
(Born this day 1813)



You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are

[Tamrin]

FREEMASONS, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes,
which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been
joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it em-
braces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distingu-
ished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order
was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster,
Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Cata-
combs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among
the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason


History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools


Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision causes
him to see things as they are, not as they ought to be


Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe,
but in proportion to their readiness to doubt


Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial;
but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation,
it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth


Impiety: Your irreverence toward my deity


Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate


Ambrose Bierce
American satirist (Devil's Dictionary)
(Born this day 1842)



Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone
wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good
way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down
the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!

(Last words of his final written communication)

[Tamrin]

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared
People to comprehend matters concerning human destiny


A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he
fashions his goods or his dwelling his goods or his dwelling.
Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences


What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that
men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth


If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those
who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it


The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides
human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started


Death is not the greatest loss in life. The
greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live


If something comes to life in others because of you,
then you have made an approach to immortality


Norman Cousins
American political journalist and peace activist (Saturday Review)
(Born this day 1912)



Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences

[Tamrin]

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible


It is often held that scientific hypotheses are constructed, and are to be constructed, only
after a detailed weighing of all possible evidence bearing on the matter, and that then and
only then may one consider, and still only tentatively, any hypotheses. This traditional
view however, is largely incorrect, for not only is it absurdly impossible of application,
but it is contradicted by the history of the development of any scientific theory


What happens in practice is that by intuitive insight, or other inexplicable
inspiration, the theorist decides that certain features seem to him more important
than others and capable of explanation by certain hypotheses. Then basing his
study on these hypotheses the attempt is made to deduce their consequences


It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example


The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little
unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing
everything, who is always with it, that we should beware of


Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive
away if your car could go straight upwards


Things are the way they are because they were the way they were


Professor Fred Hoyle, FRS
British cosmologist and science fiction author
(Born this day 1915)



There is a coherent plan in the universe,
though I don't know what it's a plan for

[Tamrin]

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I
die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled
my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago,
I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer


The truth is that the strong don’t always survive. Usually the weak survive
and the cowardly and the mediocre. They gather their forces to destroy the
strong, because the strong are at the core of their fear. They burned strong
Africans at the stake and reduced others to tortured rubble… the League of
Frightened White Men... Frightened of change. Frightened of the new. Fright-
ened of losing secret powers, privileges, and control. Imagining apocalypse


He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through,
someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled


The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story.
And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some
journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps


There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place
where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the
fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else


In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic
sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn’t force
us into a sombre cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic
sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnality,
the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day


Human beings want to know too much abut each other,
and that's why there are so many lies


Pete Hamill
American novelist and journalist (NY Post)
(Born this day 1935)



I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of
the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful

[Tamrin]

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've
found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for


One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have
to be looking for something in order to find something else


Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing
and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts


People don't get to change things. Things change
people once in a while, but people don't change things


Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what
a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid


Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil.
And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not


Cain said he wasn't Abel's keeper. Are those our only choices, keeper or killer?


Lawrence Block
American crime writer
(Born this day 1938)



As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, “People who spend the most meaningful hours
of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange”

[Tamrin]

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going


There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms,
we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms


When Republicans recently charged the President [Obama] with promoting 'class warfare,'
he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality


Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society:
whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.
President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are


It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional
returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less
on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have


The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their
means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been
able to provide them. The American economy had been growing briskly, and
America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't


A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top


Robert Reich
American political economist, professor, author and political commentator
(Born this day 1946)



It is still possible to find people who believe that government policy
did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity,
just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution

[Tamrin]