1000 Quotes That Made Me Stop, Think, and Keep Them

"A good conscience is a continual Christmas." - Benjamin Franklin

Crooked cards and straight whiskey, Slow horses and fast women. - Kenneth Rexroth

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." - George Bernard Shaw

"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny." - Albert Ellis

I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had. - Margaret Mead

"Every journey has a destination of which the traveler is unaware." - Martin Buber

"What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?" - Henry Miller

My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot. - Ashleigh Brilliant

"My friends are my estate." - Emily Dickinson

"There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” - Ernest Hemingway

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits. - Rex Stout

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - Albert Camus

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. - Bill Nye

I am colour-, faith- and gender-blind.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anais Nin

Don't make a chapter a book - FB post

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Elliot

“Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is expected to exercise an extraordinary and serious influence in the progress of society, in the end betrays such shallowness and insipidity of his fundamental idea that no one is sorry when he succeeds in writing himself out too soon.”
— From DEMONS - Fyodor Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg, Russia.

"Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself." - William Blake

Some people will go to great lengths to keep their prized mushrooms in the dark. -suddenly deaf broadcastr - Uu

You can get all A's and flunk life. - Walker Percy

see you there then when i do and you me do to -GREG ANTONSON

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that everyone of those darkly clustered houses encloses it's own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of it's imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

• Charles Dickens

Worry a little every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything. - Mary Hemingway

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes...but no plans.

• Peter F. Drucker

"It's never too late to become what you might have been." - George Elliot

Even God cannot change the past. - Agathon

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."

• Anais Nin

Black holes are where God divided by zero. - Steven Wright

"Wishing won't get you anywhere. The life you have is the one you've made for yourself. If you want something different, you're going to have to do something differently." ~ Unknown

But Madonna again found a silver lining in the firestorm. “One of the many things I learned from all of this: If you aren’t willing to fight for what you believe in, then don’t even enter the ring.”

"Several excuses are always less convincing than one." - Aldous Huxley

I am a firm believer that governments get defeated, not elected. - P Armstrong quoting someone

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

• Albert Einstein

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

If for nothing more than a polititical and/or public service clean slate policy, the FSB has long since replaced the KGB but the FSB is consistantly referred to as the KGB because the Russians aren't stupid nor easily fooled; and to quote George Carlin's comparison of how we moralize and soften our language so it hurts us less, 'if you change the name of the disease, you don't change the disease.' - bA

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

• Marcus Tullius Cicero

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. - Anonymous

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. George Eliot

"I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself." - Jules Renard

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none." - William Shakespeare

"One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present." - Stephen Covey

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are--chaff and grain together--certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away... - Dinah Mulock

Where there is no patrol car, there is no speed limit. - Peter Beckmann

"Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death." - Hunter S. Thompson

"We cannot see the future, but we sure as hell can work toward the future we want to see."
Brian Antonson, August 2013

"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind." -- Khalil Gibran

me to Asante: your word seems to encapsulate the problems in the world 'interpretation' and those who blindly follow someone else's... wow, you may have hit on the social policy crux of both the religious and secular worlds within ours

In order for people to be happy, sometimes they have to take risks. It's true these risks can put them in danger of being hurt. - Meggin Cabot

"Daddy - roll up the windows, the pizza smells is getting out" - Riley age 5 Sept 2013

so today's kid quote that makes you go hmmm....... first you have to know that Ava is in grade 4.
so she calls me at work to tell me that they got a new girl in their class today. so i asked her to tell me about her. she says "well her name is rachel. and she has a twin in grade 5." - Debbie Quayle

"The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day." - Donald Barthelme

Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. - William Durant

Not all who wander are lost. - J. R. R. Tolkien

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist. - Novalis

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. - James Halliwell

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero." Lat., "Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow. - Horace

BBC - Why meddle with something for which there is a Latin, and therefore authoritative, term?

Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits not foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail. - Henry David Thoreau

One of my favorite mantras is I am totally adequate for any and all situations that may come my way-coffee site

Never follow somebody else's path; it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone...the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way. - J. Michael Straczynski

Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story. - John Pentland Mahaffy

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." - Henry David Thoreau

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

• Theodore Roosevelt

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

• Edwin Powell Hubble

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein

"Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow." - William McFee

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life." - Virginia Woolf

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once. - Audrey Hepburn

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes. - Saint Clement of Alexandria

The most essential factor is persistence - the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come. - James Whitcomb Riley

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy." - Desiderata

"It's never too late to become what you might have been." - George Elliot

Even God cannot change the past. - Agathon

The real fun comes in solving problems - massaging a line into shape, making the rhythm of a scene work, getting the right blocking so it feels natural and easy. - Harrison Ford

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism. - Herbert Hoover

"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind." -- Khalil Gibran

"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence." -from "The Madman" (1918) - Khalil Gibran

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” - Ayn Rand

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

• Victor Hugo

"If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart." - Socrates; Diogenes Laërtius in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Book II, §27) to the following quote;

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. - Jules de Gaultier

Do not despise the bottom rungs in the ascent to greatness. - Publius Syrus

if one has a God-given creative talent then one should use it or else reap sorrow and despair. - Kristoffer Kristofferson

Leonard Cohen's "Bird on the Wire" on his tombstone:
Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

"Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself." - Michel de Montaigne

from Telus site: I would like an Asian-friendly phone number so that its last 4 digits do not contain 4, 5 or 7.

"Never ruin an apology with an excuse." - Kimberly Johnson

Veni, vidi, vici. Ego feci amici magnam aliquam. - Gaius Julius Caesar

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. - Jonathan Kozol

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

• Robert Louis Stevenson

[A writer] must try to think clearly, to feel deeply, to write honestly. If he is fortunate he will make a living, but his work will never be anymore essentially clear and deep and honest than he himself is, and he will be judged finally not for how many copies his books have sold, but for what they have done to enrich the lives of their readers, now and in time to come. - Lawrence Clark Powell

"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. - Jeanette Winterson

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make. - Truman Capote

Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death. - Omar (General) Bradley

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. - Leo Tolstoy

Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it charm. - Jean Paul Richter

You're more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action. So act! Whatever it is you know you should do, do it. - Jerome Brunet

"Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness."

• Kahlil Gibran

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. - Samuel Smiles

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.- Proverbs

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it." - Rene Descartes

For they are yet ear-kissing arguments. - William Shakespeare

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior. - Sir Francis Bacon

It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life. - Sister Elizabeth Kenny

If all your peers understand what you've done, it's not creative. - H. Heimlich

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words tripped up, bewildered and so defeated - thrown aside - a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions. - William Carlos Williams

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong" - Voltaire.

"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." - Rosa Luxemburg

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. - Stephen W. Hawking

ozzy - He recently announced he had been sober for four months. Iommi is in remission.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. - Edward Albee

Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose. - Unknown

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. - Robert Louis Stevenson

What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. - John B. Gough

No one is listening until you make a mistake. - Unknown

"Action is the antidote to despair." - Joan Baez

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." - Bertrand Russell

There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow, that path is for your steps alone. - Jerry Garcia

This is the gift all writers seek--to write language that incandesces yet does not melt. - Lawrence Clark Powell

"The writer is the engineer of the human soul." — Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)

"Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. - Mark Twain

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America. - William J. Clinton

The miracles of nature do not seem miracles because they are so common. If no one had ever seen a flower, even a dandelion would be the most startling event in the world. - Unknown

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

• Jane Austen

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. - Bertrand Russell

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better. - Michel de Montaigne

"Sooner or later, everybody sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson

The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein

Words are only painted fire; a book is the fire itself. - Mark Twain

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. - Richard Lovelace

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. - Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice." - Ernest Hemingway

Inspired teachers ... cannot be ordered by the gross from the factory. They must be discovered one by one, and brought home from the woods and swamps like orchids. They must be placed in a conservatory, not in a carpenter shop; and they must be honored and trusted. - John Jay Chapman

Supposing you have tried and failed again and again. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "Failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down. - Mary Pickford

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand. - Sir Edward Appleton

If [women] understood and exercised their power they could remake the world. - Emily Taft Douglas

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan

"How has it happened that I am writing to you?
Once you honored me with your confidence. Perhaps you have quite forgotten me now. How has it happened that I am writing to you? I don’t know; but I felt an irresistible desire to remind you, just you, of my existence."
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."

• Albert Einstein

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. - Douglas Adams

Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway. - John Wayne

“Salvation does not lie in the rituals and profession of faith, but in a lucid understanding of the meaning of one’s life.” ― Leo Tolstoy

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing--not perfect.

• Henry Moore

Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning.

• Mahatma Gandhi

I don't think I've mastered anything.I'm still wrestling with the same frustrations, the same issues, the same problems as I always did. That's what life is like. - Harrison Ford

"Have the courage to act instead of react." - Earlene Larson Jenks

Inside of a ring or out, ain't nothing wrong with going down. It's staying down that's wrong. - Muhammad Ali

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more. - Sir Winston Churchill

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

• James Russell Lowell

God is subtle but he is not malicious. - Albert Einstein

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. - P. J. O'Rourke

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

• Alfred Polgar

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." - Honoré de Balzac

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness. - Elbert Hubbard

You may feel like dwelling on your limits or your fears. Don't do it. A perfect prescription for a squandered, unfulfilled life is to accommodate self-defeating feelings while undercutting your finest, most productive ones. - Marsha Sinetar

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. - Gore Vidal

Vizinczey - Stephen (?????)

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive. - Edith Wharton

In every job, relationship, or life situation there is inevitably some turbulence. Learn to laugh at it. It is part of what you do and who you are - Allen Klein

"Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather. He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop."

• Alfred Polgar

Time is like a snowflake--it melts away while we try to decide what to do with it. - Unknown

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. - Marcus Aurelius

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun." - John D. Rockefeller

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. - Thomas Paine

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. - Robert Southey

Nobody has ever bet enough on a winning horse. - Richard Sasuly

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. - Emma Goldman

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

• John Pierpont Morgan

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

• Kim Hubbard

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength." - Corrie ten Boom

"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you won't do anything with it."

• M. Scott Peck

"How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words." - Samuel Adams

"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
~ St. Francis of Assisi

"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." - Rosa Luxemburg

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears." - Michel de Montaigne

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre. - Gail Godwin

"I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide." - Emily Bronte

"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it." - John Ruskin

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you-if you don't repeat it. - Pearl Bailey

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything --even poverty--you can survive it. - Bill Cosby

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I would ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

• Rachel Carson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. - Dale Carnegie

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world.. there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her.. and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well.. I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that... yes.. it's true. I'm here.. and I'm just as strange as you.” ~ Frida Kahlo

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. - Max Planck

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain

"It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it." - Amelia Barr

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted. - James Branch Cabell

Woulda coulda shoulda...three of the saddest words in the English language! - Uu

I can't believe my sanity depends on my abandoning you - Disturbed (Sickened)

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow." - Mary Anne Radmacher

When an old man dies, a library burns down. - Proverbs

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. - Elbert Hubbard

"The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." - Oscar Wilde

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. - Michelangelo

My life has been one great big joke. A dance that's walked. A song that's spoken. Sometimes I laugh until I choke when I think of myself. - Maya Angelou

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same. - Audrey Hepburn

To this day the boy that used to bully me in school still takes my money. On the other hand, he does make great Subway sandwiches!

You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive. - Margaret Thatcher

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day. - Ambrose Bierce

During our crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced he understood it. - Chaim Weizmann

"The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." - Antony Jay

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive. - Samuel Goldwyn

When I am dead, I hope it is said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'. - Hilaire Belloc

Let me, tonight look back across the span Twixt dawn and dark, and to my conscience say- Because of some good act to beast or human- The world is better that I lived today. - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It's designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone. - A Bartlett Giamatti

Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.

• Marie Louise (Ouida) De La Ramee

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery' Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! - Patrick Henry

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

• Doris Lessing

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. - Helen Keller

I haven't reported my missing credit card to the police because whoever stole it is spending less than my wife. - Nastase
Look with favour upon a bold beginning. - Virgil

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. - John Maynard Keynes

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears." - Michel de Montaigne

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.J Austen

"Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious." - B.C. Forbes

'Victor Victoria'
"I am the private investigator."
"Good. Now... you must be very careful."
"I am always careful."
"That stool is broken."
"It is?" (CrAsH)

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm. - Henry David Thoreau

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre. - Gail Godwin

Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. - William Durant

"As time passes we all get better at blazing a trail through the thicket of advice." - Margot Bennett

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. - Katherine Mansfield

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. - Aldous Huxley

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in , therein to be content.

• Helen Keller

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness. - George Bernard Shaw

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance left in my favor.

• Johann von Goethe

Anyone can become angry--that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way--this is not easy. - Aristotle

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. - H. L. Mencken

Eagles don't flock--you have to find them one at a time. - Ross Perot

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death--fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous constant. - Edna Ferber

Don't let yourself forget what it's like to be sixteen. - Unknown

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline. - Ayelet Waldman

ALWAYS "respect the level of technology you're dealing with"... Uu re the Exotic Car Crash compilation from Sean Mar2013

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." - Socrates

"Nobody can go back and have a new beginning, but everyone can start over today and have a new ending!" -Uu email

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." - Friedrich Schiller

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she'd kill me. She thinks I'm selling dope. - Henny Youngman

A great flame follows a little spark. - Dante Alighieri

If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been. - H. Robert Schuller

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

• Albert Einstein

"The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." - Samuel Johnson

“We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out” - W. Churchill

hahaha (its the new lol) - NOT Debbie Mar1 2013

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." - Christopher Hitchens

"were encumbered by sobriety," as The Police Were... Joshua Tree overdose Gram Parsons

I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind. - Patrick Dennis

Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. - Mark Twain

Everyone fails. But that doesn't mean you must identify yourself as a failure. Failure applies to a situation, a particular time and place. If you don't let it devastate you, failure can be an opportunity: for learning, for recovery, for the creation and demonstration of character. No one wins all the time. Learn to take your losses, learn from them if possible, and move on.

• Gary Ryan Blair

The greatest mistake you can make is to be continually fearing you will make one. - Elbert Hubbard

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp - James Ullman

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly

No longer forward nor behind I look in hope or fear; But, grateful, take the good I find, The best of now and here. - John Greenleaf Whittier

To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal. - P. J. O'Rourke

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. - Bjarne Stroustrup

Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones of genius. - Elbert Hubbard

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. - E. M. Cioran

We must, however, acknowledge as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. - Charles Darwin

In Heaven all the interesting people are missing. - Friedrich Nietzsche

"It took me a long time to realize I'm a slow learner...." - f/Dad from someone

Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life. - Herbert Otto

"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold." - Leo Tolstoy

"Fool!" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write." - Sir Philip Sidney

Worry is spiritual short sight. Its cure is intelligent faith. - Paul Brunton

"The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief." - William Shakespeare

"He only profits from praise who values criticism." - Heinrich Heine

Impact is a nasty thing - Uu

Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns. - Unknown

"Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail." - Charles F. Kettering

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. - Albert Einstein

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. - Douglas Adams

Jesus, please teach me to appreciate what I have before time forces me to appreciate what I had. - Susan L. Lenzkes

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences. - Rousseau

A good judge doesn't know the strength of the plaintiff's case until he's heard the defense. - William Sheffield

"We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude." - Cynthia Ozick

Time the devourer of all things. - Ovid

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it." - Rita Mae Brown

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt

"He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself." - Thomas Fuller

Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity. - Cato the Elder

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. - G. K. Chesterton

Ezra Pound: Literature is news that stays news.

Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good. - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older. - Larry McMurty

Never let yesterday use up too much of today. - Will Rogers

Paul Valery: For a poet, is is never a matter of saying it is raining. It's always a matter of... making rain.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life. - Bertolt Brecht

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!? - Rudyard Kipling

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort. - Sydney Smith

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Phillip K. Dick

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists. - M. C. Escher

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today. - James Dean

"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." - Mark Twain

"Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else." - William Rotsler

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate. - Ambrose Bierce

“The past cannot be changed, the future is still in your power.” — Hugh White

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. - Sigmund Freud

“The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.” - Henri Frederic Amiel

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it. - John Irving

My life is my message. - Mahatma Gandhi

Zen - "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

Today, if you are not confused, you are just not thinking clearly. - U. Peter

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." - William Arthur Ward

By your own soul, learn to live And if men thwart you take no heed. If men hate you have no care. Sing your song, dream your dream, Hope your hope and pray your prayer. - Parkenham Beatty

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. - Oscar Wilde

I don't want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is. - Roy M. Cohn

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore. - W. Somerset Maugham

Today, if you are not confused, you are just not thinking clearly. - U. Peter

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all. - Elbert Hubbard

When will the public cease to insult the teacher's calling with empty flattery' When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?

• William C. Bagley

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

• Plotinus

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. - Alan Alda

"There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad, and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right and pray for the people who don't. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living." Amen

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no matter what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination...you can make feast of straw. - Jane Stanton Hitchcock

“If”

By: Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against--not with--the wind. - Hamilton Wright Mabie

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

• Thomas Hardy

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemingway

Talking of successful rackets / modesty deserves a mention. / Exclamation marks in brackets / never fail to draw attention. -Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.- Ralph Waldo Emerson

méiguānxi - idiom meaning "no problem" in Mandarin Chinese.

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane." - Philip K. Dick

Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself. - Alan Alda

"The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!" - Jane Austen

Be yourself....Everyone else is taken.

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

• George Bernard Shaw

Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself. - Alan Alda

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. - Plotinus

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." - Eddie Rickenbacker

"You miss 100% of the shots you never take." - Wayne Gretzky

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.

• Dale Carnegie

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

"You say too many prayers for an innocent man." - THE WAY BACK

We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

• James W. Fulbright

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."

• Lou Holtz

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is to be expecting evil before it comes.

• Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Take life just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though, the world awaited your coming. Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes, to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heart-broken brother. Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose.The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit.- Unknown

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." - Aldous Huxley

"It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from the sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise." - Ralph Waldo Emmerson

You can do what you want to do, accomplish what you want to accomplish, attain any reasonable objective you may have in mind--not all of a sudden, perhaps not in one swift and sweeping act of achievement--but you can do it gradually, day by day and play by play, if you want to do it, if you work to do it, over a sufficiently long period of time.

• William E. Holler

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact. Be not afraid to live." - William James

"Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out." - Benjamin Franklin

"Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure." - Rachel Naomi Remen

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. - Mark Twain

a wound of the whole of human nature - Aquinis

"You're born an original. Don't die a copy." - John Mason

i make a church out of words - Don Henley

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird--that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity. - Charles Mingus

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better." - Albert Camus

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka

"If you can make people laugh, you get all the love you want." - Art Buchwald

"Failure: A man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience." - Elbert Hubbard

"An army of sheep lead by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep." - Arab proverb

"It's not your job to like me -- it's mine." - Byron Katie

You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty. - Cecil Baxter

"Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson

I talk to you with my hands and you can read me with your eyes - Chinese saying

Would you like me to give you a formula for...success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure... You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all... You can be discouraged by failure--or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success. On the far side. - Thomas J. (Jr.) Watson

if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night. - Abraham Joshua Heschel

A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. - Unknown

even in the pixelled heat of internet argument. BBC JL 1st, re Nazi

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's." - Billy Wilder

Art comes after an incredible load of work and only one thing will see you through that work--passion. - Don Hahn

You got more past than future - SafeHouse

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.- Phillips Brooks

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. - Sir Winston Churchill

another somebody i thought was already gone... GANTONSO June 6 2012

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started." - Marcus Garvey

We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more. - Madame Swetchine

To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil by evil is evil. - Mohammed

wtf? If you can't see it, before you see it, you'll never see it. - Jack (Dr.) Graham

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go. - Richard Bach

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." - Carl Jung

If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place... If you get a chance,take it, If it changes your life,let it. Nobody said it would be easy they just said it would be worth it...
"Accept the challenges so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory." - George S. Patton Jr.

"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today." - Ernest Hemingway

"To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted." - George Kneller

"Everything is so dangerous that nothing is really very frightening." - Gertrude Stein

"oh and the writing will come, and grow, and be your lantern down dark streets." - SA Nov 16 2010

"To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized." - Albert Einstein

"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." - Henry Ford

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." - Will Durant

“There must be more to life than sitting wondering if there is more to life.” - Unknown

“Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.” - Albert Einstein

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself." - Derek Walcott

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. - Doug Larson

"Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality." - Ralph Marston

"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do." - Henry Ford

"Is it not better to keep silence about matters which speech is incompetent to express; to be content with revolving in the deeps of the mind the infinite possibilities of the unknown?" - Thomas Huxley God=MC²

"Throughout history the only proven profitable form of writing has been ransom notes..." DAD but f/someone else

"You're born an original. Don't die a copy." - John Mason

i make a church out of words - Don Henley

A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. - George Steiner

"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." - Sam Walton

"A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." - Kenneth Tynan

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." - William Faulkner

"Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them." - Orison Swett Marden

Fun Fact: If you bury a gas bill, it will decompose in about four months.

"An army of sheep lead by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep." - Arab proverb

pain is the only education worth having - History Boys

some jump, some dive - SA Sept 13 2010

Every time you reach an obstacle there is always a way over, under, around or through it… Rick Hansen

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. - Mark Twain

'bread is death' Dad on way home from yvr after Iran/Iraq

that's life, you wake up dead-DS

Malachi 3:17 Or Almighty, "my treasured possession, in the day when I act"

Straighten out what ever problems you think you have and you'll find you don't have any problems.

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough - Mario Andretti

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." - Eddie Rickenbacker

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."- Bertrand Russell

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." - George S. Patton

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown." - Carl Jung

cacoenthes scribendi (sp. the e has 2 dots above): It means 'an incurable itch to write...'

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. - Alfred North Whitehead

"It was ever thus...cherry picking the beneficence of the creator..." - Uu on Scott's friend's tsunami account
"Energy and persistence conquer all things." - Benjamin Franklin

"Character, the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life, is the source from which self-respect springs." - Joan Didion

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” - Robert A. Heinlein

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. - Christopher Morley

In our family we have always said: today's newspaper is used to wrap the fish in tomorrow." Lena Germany's Eurostar

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure." - Helen Keller

“All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.” - Ernest Hemingway

"They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price." - Kahlil Gibran

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life." - Charles Darwin

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed." - William James

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."- Bertrand Russell

Caveat scripter - writer beware ...from a BBC article feb21 2010

"Debt is the worst poverty." - Thomas Fuller

Malachi 3:17 Or Almighty, "my treasured possession, in the day when I act

Straighten out what ever problems you think you have and you'll find you don't have any problems.

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough - Mario Andretti

«????? ???????????, ??????????? ??? ?? ?????? ? ???????» [after a long, wonderful day in the sun and out in nature]

«???????» [Facebook]

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” Bertolt Brecht
I’m day-dreaming mostly about «????????-???????????» [very very cold] locales.

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, any one can start now and make a brand new ending. ~ Marcus Aurelius

When I'm at home, my wife is my right hand. When I'm away, my right-hand is my wife - Dave Rabbit Saigon Radio 196?

??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ? ???

"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." - Benjamin Spock

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." - Eddie Rickenbacker

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."- Bertrand Russell

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." - George S. Patton

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown." - Carl Jung

"Protons are complicated particles, they've got quarks, [and other small particles], and colliding them is like colliding two garbage cans and watching carrots come out," John Ellis CERN

@If you spent one minute looking at each painting in the Hermitage, it would take eight years." - Michael Caine - Mifnight in St Petersburg.

Marilyn Ferguson: “Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.”

Godwin's Law - a rule that, over time, all internet debates will end up with one participant comparing another to Adolf Hitler, or the Nazis.

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, trust not to the morrow." - Horace

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." - George S. Patton

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions." - Augusten Burroughs

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." - e.e cummings

'We wish we saw ourselves as others, ANYONE else, sees us... for what we see of ourselves is eclipsed by them. And whatever we believe, we give each a loud voice.' bA

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. - John Kenneth Galbraith

obliq·ui·ty 3 a : indirectness or deliberate obscurity of speech or conduct b : an obscure or confusing statement

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." - Ayn Rand

"Your world is all these elements; of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch. Woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it." bA

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to bA

Every day i wake up and decide to give humanity another chance - bA

Religion has been the greatest distraction from the truth - bA

"The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances." - Aristotle

"How dare you accuse me of drinking?" i said. I then slurred together a few bible quotes on judging people and throwing stones. bA

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

Only church or state can sustain a grudge indefinately - bA feb15 2010

Here is a fine sentence, 'Zeal triumphs over all.' That is the script of the Russian War Office.

"They are able because they think they are able." - Virgil

Panglossian: marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds : excessively optimistic

"A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence."

Kismet: Fate or Destiny in Turkish and Urdu, a predetermined course of events

?????????????: the untranslatable

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." - Erich Fromm

"A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind. - John Neal

"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." - Carl Jung

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income. - Edmund Wilson

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. - Walt Whitman

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both. - John Andrew Holmes

"I think we have room for fewer words here" Dad's editor Dec09

"If you want to be happy, be." - Leo Tolstoy

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. - Gail Godwin

"Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts."

• Jean Cocteau

Professor Raj Persaud posits: “Promise yourself, no matter how difficult the problem life throws at you, that you will try as hard as you can to help yourself. You acknowledge that sometimes your efforts to help yourself may not result in success, as often being properly rewarded is not in your control.

"Clear your mind of can't." - Dr. Samuel Johnson

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

"They are able because they think they are able." - Virgil

'the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureaka" but "That's funny..." - Issac Asimov

good friends die every day... we simply don't know them? - SA DEC 22 09

All things are difficult before they are easy. - Dr. Thomas Fuller

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. - H W Longfellow

"One never knows what each day is going to bring. The important thing is to be open and ready for it." - Henry Moore

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us. - Quentin Crisp

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. - Sir Winston Churchill

"We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge." - Rutherford Rogers

"Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in." - Andrew Jackson

"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome." - Samuel Johnson

"To want to forget something is to think of it." - French Proverb

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." - William James

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." - Thomas Huxley

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"You can tell the character of every man when you see how he receives praise." - Seneca

French: « Vous devez tout voir, tout entendre et tout oublier. » Napoléon Bonaparte
English: "You have to see everything, hear everything and forget about everything. " Napoleon Bonaparte

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." - William James

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad. - Diogenes the Cynic

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. - J. M. Barrie

"A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key." - Paul Valery

We must travel in the direction of our fear. - John Berryman

You give my regards to St. Peter, or whoever has his job, but in Hell. - Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"they'd be dead by now if they weren't dead already" - greg antonson

"Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

7 Chakra points is most open; Root, Sacral, Navel, Heart, Throat, Third-Eye, or Crown.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. - Edwin Schlossberg

Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. - H. L. Mencken

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. - Barry LePatner

big ball of fire 93 million miles away, life giver and taker... GregA.

"I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom." - Anatole France

"Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed." - William James

Tennessee Williams quote "A prayer for the wild at heart in cages"

The Australian novelist Lily Brett once said: "If you write a book, you've got to write your heart out."

But for a nail the shoe was lost,
But for a shoe the horse was lost,
But for a horse the soldier was lost,
But for a soldier the war was lost,
But for a war the kingdom was lost

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! - incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage." - Mark Twain

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation." - Charlotte Bronte

I want us to "Fireproof" our marriage- Jayson Dax

from card Uu from Dad, "You've got a face that'd make a train take a dirt road on a rainy night...."

"Everybody's friend is nobody's." - Arthur Schopenhauer

I hate the outdoors. To me the outdoors is where the car is. - Will Durst

Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning. - Marlo Thomas

"The tree hides the forest." French proverb

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. - Bill Cosby

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. - Malcolm Forbes

"Forever is composed of nows." - Emily Dickinson

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."

• Sir Winston Churchill

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing. - R. D. Laing

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us." - Helen Keller

“One of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure on a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off, with one mighty effort, the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the clock of many Cares, and the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope --- the three sister Graces of our moral being.” - Captain Sir Richard Burton

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy. - Janet Long

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. - James Thurber

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." - John Steinbeck

"There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook."

• Norman Douglas

"There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face." - Georg Lichtenberg

"Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers." - John Stuart Mill

"The secret to being a hero is knowing when to die." - Will Rogers

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit." - Somerset Maugham

WH Auden's remark that a real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings.?

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action." - Benjamin Disraeli

"Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop." - Ovid

Laughter is the closest distance between two people. - Victor Borge

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." - Henry David Thoreau

I have often depended on the blindness of strangers. - Adrienne E. Gusoff

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

• Christopher Morley

"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength." - Henry David Thoreau

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment. - Henry David Thoreau

We had the experience but missed the meaning. - T. S. Eliot

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. - Oscar Wilde

She was a star, a pinnacle of light at the top, but as time passed, she slipped everso and became a falling star, a shooting star for another to wish on. - Sean Antonson March 28 09

It's not a matter of whether or not someone's watching over you. It's just a question of their intentions. - R.K. Milholland

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. - Tom Stoppard

"One should count each day a separate life." - Seneca

Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions. -Yahia Lababidi, author (b. 1973)

To find yourself, think for yourself - Socrates

given the givens - Uu

There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal. - Kierkegaard

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. - Blaise Pascal

And then there is Sweden's liberal culture, part of which is the principle of Allemansratten."Allemansratten means everyone's right. It's an important part of Swedish culture and identity," Katrine Kielos, a columnist on Sweden's best-selling daily tabloid Aftonbladet, explains."It means that the law of trespass is very weak in Sweden, so you have the right to access somebody's property in a way that is not possible in other countries."

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. - MARK TWAIN

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn. - GORE VIDAL

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." - Marie Curie

"I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself." - Michel de Montaigne

Shakespeare's "Henry V": We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be never so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. - Nikola Tesla

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately. - Michel de Montaigne

"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him." - Jan Patocka

To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all. - Peter McWilliams, Life 101

"Let your capital be simplicity and contentment." - Henry David Thoreau

Virtue is its own punishment. - Aneurin Bevan

French: « Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l'ours avant de l'avoir tué. » Proverbe français
English: "Do not sell the skin of the bear before you kill it." French proverb

Asked for a summary of the Jewish religion in the most concise terms, Hillel replied (reputedly while standing on one leg): "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. The rest is the explanation; go and learn."

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. - Thomas Mann

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. OneÂ’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things." - Henry Miller

"They can because they think they can." - Vergil

"Be who you are and say what you feel 'cause people who mind don't matter, and people who matter don't mind."

• Theodor Seuss Geisel

"The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences." - D.H. Lawrence

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it. - Rita Mae Brown

Should old acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, And days of old long past.... " - Robert Burns Dec 31 2008...

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting. - Charles Bukowski

Turkish proverb: 'You cannot put out fire with flames.'

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." - Theodore Roosevelt

He that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ) ~

"Ira furor brevis est. Anger is a short madness." - Horace

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely. - Hesketh Pearson

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. - Arthur Schopenhauer

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion. - Robert Chapman

"Words are loaded pistols." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Note: No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

"For the most part, fear is nothing but an illusion. When you share it with someone else, it tends to disappear."
Marilyn C. Barrick

"We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them." - Livy

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. - Sir Arthur Eddington

Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are. - Laurence J. Peter

If you do not know how to help a patient, at least do nothing that will be harmful to him. - Hippocrate

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness. - Robertson Davies

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." - Elbert Hubbard
bA's collection of best quotes...

My theory is that if you look confident you can pull off anything - even if you have no clue what you're doing.

• Jessica Alba

"Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes." - Seneca

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. - Norman Mailer

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense." - Winston Churchill

"Mistakes are at the very base of human thought ... feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done." - Lewis Thomas

Man must discipline himself by good thoughts, good words, good deeds. — Zoroastrian scripture

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. - Stephen King

"Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away." - Thomas Fuller

"a man is more than the worst thing he has ever done" - unknown

"Drop the question what tomorrow may bring, and count as profit every day that Fate allows you." - Horace

"Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice." - Marcel Proust

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. - Henry David Thoreau

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

• Pablo Picasso

"The drawing is not the shape, it is how to see the shape." - Edgar Degas

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret anything that made you smile. Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. - Philip K. Dick

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. - Kurt Vonnegut

"The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is." - Desiderius Erasmus

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. ~ J. G. Ballard

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. - Timothy Leary

"May your rails be silver and your rail dreams golden" - Americanrail.com

Oh, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant. -William Shakespeare

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. - Umberto Eco

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? - Ursula K. Le Guin, author (b. 1929)

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. - Paul Valery

"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth." - Umberto Eco

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu

"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." - Thomas Henry Huxley

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

"There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming." - Soren Kierkegaard

"No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen." - Epictetus

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets." - Arthur Miller

"It is hard to believe a man is telling you the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place." - H. L. Mencken

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do. - Olin Miller

"One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things." - John Burroughs

I would not so dishonour God as to lend my voice to perpetuate all the mad and foolish things which men have dared to say of Him. I believe that we may find in the Bible the highest and purest religion ..... most of all in the history of Him in whose name we all are called. His religion — not the Christian religion , but the religion of Christ — the poor man's gospel; the message of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of love; and, oh, how gladly would I spend my life, in season and out of season, in preaching this! But I must have no hell terrors, none of these fear doctrines; they were not in the early creeds, God knows whether they were ever in the early gospels, or ever passed His lips. He went down to hell , but it was to break the chains, not to bind them. ~ James Anthony Froude

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long. - Leonard Bernstein

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

• Nelson Mandela

"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages." - Virginia Woolf

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." - William James

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." - William Butler Yeats

"In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism." - Hannah Arendt

Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways. - Samuel McChord Crothers

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. - Orson Welles

"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." - Dorothy Thompson

Communism is like one big phone company. - Lenny Bruce

"Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible." - Edward Teller

"Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one." - Voltaire

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not. ~Author Unknown

Always act like you're wearing an invisible crown. ~Author Unknown

It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. ~Sally Kempton, Esquire, 1970

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor. ~Nicholas de Chamfort

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. ~African Proverb

The best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do. ~Author Unknown

We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do. ~Olin Miller

Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you. ~Nicholai Velimirovic

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ~Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles," 1992 (commonly attributed to Nelson Mandela, 1994 inauguration speech)

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. ~Louisa May Alcott

It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes. ~Sally Field

Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking distance. ~Author Unknown

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. - Soren Kierkegaard

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. - John Updike

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

"There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming." - Soren Kierkegaard

Every fear is a crime against My Love. Practice saying "All is well". Say it until you believe it. Know it. - Two Listeners

"Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so." - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false. - Paul Valery

"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears." - Rudyard Kipling

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. - Bertrand Russell

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously. - Nicholas Butler

"To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change." - Charles Horton Cooley

I'm not going to talk about what I did as a child. What I am going to talk about -- and I am going to say this consistently -- [is that] it is irrelevant what I did 20 to 30 years ago. What's relevant is that I have learned from any mistakes I made. I do not want to send signals to anybody that what Gov. Bush did 30 years ago is cool to try. - George w. Bush

in an interview with WMUR-TV in New Hampshire, when asked if he had used drugs, marijuana, cocaine

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical. - GK Chesterton

"As soon as we attract enough attention in the world to play a part in it, we are set rolling like a ball which will never again be at rest." - Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne

You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty. - Cecil Baxter

"Mediocrity is a hand-rail." - Charles Louis de Secondat

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. - Steve Jobs

Â"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only wallsÂ" - Joseph Campbell

No wise man ever wished to be younger. - Jonathan Swift

"Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them." - Edward R. Murrow

coup de foudre = love at first sight

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions." - Frank Lloyd Wright

"The most important political office is that of the private citizen." - Louis Brandeis

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. - GK Chesterton

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.” – Lin Yutang

God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. - Sir William Bragg

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

The best way out is always through. - Robert Frost

"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." - Arthur Rubinstein

"How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees." - William Shakespeare

"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs." - Joan Didion

"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him." - Rachel Carson

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

You're probably wondering why somebody who has been in politics is talking about Social Security. After all, it's been called the third rail of American politics. You grab a hold of it, and you get electrified. - George w. Bush

Fortune sides with he who dares. ~ Virgil

"Captured forever on the retinas of strangers." - Brian Antononononononononson

"We live in our desires rather than in our achievements." - George Moore

...Seggendo in piuma in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre,
sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma cotal vestigo in terra di sé lascia qual fummo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma.
'Lying in a featherbed will bring you no fame, nor staying beneath the quilt, and he who uses up his life without achieving fame leaves no more vestige of himself on Earth than smoke in the air or foam upon the water.' Dante Canto XXIV, lines 47-51

'O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter sting to thee is a little fault!' Dante

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public. - Sir Winston Churchill

He has the most who is most content with the least. - Diogenes

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad. - Diogenes

Don't think it.
If you think it, don't say it.
If you say it, don't write it.
If you write it, don't sign it.
If you sign it, don't be surprised.

• Belorussian proverb

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. - Oscar Wilde

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

"Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face."

• Johnny Depp

"Never was anything great achieved without danger." - Niccolo Machiavelli

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. - Paul Gauguin

"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." - James Russell Lowell

Doris Lessing said "There's something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross".But she said as a writer it was important not to care what other people think and that the profession must honour that."We are free... here I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?"

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. - Floyd Dell

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - Johann von Neumann

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool. - Jane Wagner

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude." Aldous Huxley

"had a great dinner with J&J, i left a hearty mix of zucchini and sauce on my plate... of course the dogs were already in position and Jack starts talking about how they have no negatives, no threats, they don't know harm... then he said that they only sometimes know disappointment when they don't get to lick the plates... but he had a beautiful line, "for them, the only bad thing that can happen is a good thing that doesn't happen"-bA

the last temptation is the worst treason; to do the right thing but for the wrong reason -ME

"Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe." Oprah Winfrey

"Men have called me mad," wrote Edgar Allan Poe, "but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." - Eric Hoffer

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say. - Cyril Connolly

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. - Benjamin Disraeli

You are now upon a mountain climb. Steep steps lead upward, but your power to help others will be truly marvelous.
--Two Listeners April 28

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. - Chris Morley

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." - Thomas Szasz

'That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...' - Charles M. Schulz

"You have to have patience in this business, that seems to be the big moral of my story. You can't take any step and assume it will lead to another step. You have to appreciate the step you're on." - Neil Patrick Harris

Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic. - Dan Rather

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. - John le Carre

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. - Bertrand Russell

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. - Stephen Hawking

If someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad. - Diogenes the Cynic

"Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you."

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being." - Anatole France

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. - Carl Jung

When I look at a list of all the things I've done, it really does blow my mind. I really did a lot of stuff and nobody knows it - Jack Nitzsche.

"Every law is an infraction of liberty."

Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Walt Whitman

"Flowers grow out of dark moments." - Corita Kent

what Einstein realized is that "how fast you're moving" is a question with no objective answer, it is clear that you have to give the speed of light a special place in your theory. - Schismatic

It is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy. - Einstein

Choose to think about thoughts that make you feel good about yourself always and in all ways.

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice. - George Jackson

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. - Edith Sitwell

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti

"Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively." - Voltaire

"An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise." - William Dean Howells

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

• John W. Gardner

"Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." - Abraham Lincoln

"If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?" - Sherwood Anderson

"Probably it is because I am by profession a storyteller that I cannot
resist a good tale, and it makes no matter if I end up telling it as
a piece of fiction or as what calls itself truth. Just do not, I prithee,
confuse me with a clam."
The Specialist Said; The Sunday Independent (Dublin, Ireland); May 28, 2006.

"If you're strong enough, there are no precedents." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Sir Francis Bacon

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

• Fritz Perls

cknw murder trial july 2010 - Defence lawyer Deanna Gaffar asked why, in this instance, a person with a fairly common bipolar disorder could turn so violent. Lohrasbe said he couldn't say but speculated that, in North America at least, people live segregated lives where they have nothing to do but indulge their delusions.

Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class - Lenin

A little knowledge is dangerous. So is a lot.((On first episode of Eureka.)) - Einstein

Be careful what you pray for. During the year of my depression, I got down on my knees every morning and begged God to give me a brain tumor and/or cancer--some kind of terminal illness--as a graceful exit out of this life, a departure that wouldn't leave my kids as traumatized as my suicide would. Now that I actually want to be around, I get a tumor.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past. - George Carlin

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult. - EB White

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. - William James

"Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. - Einstein

"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground." Marcel Proust

He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes." - H. E. Martz

"To cheat one's self out of love is the greatest deception of which there is no reparation in either time or eternity."

• Soren Keirkegarrd

For the purpose of making a declaration under this Subdivision, the Commissioner may: A) treat a particular event that actually happened as not having happened; and B) treat a particular event that did not actually happen as having happened
unscripted family

"try to play chess when the world is handing you checkers," suggests Rusty Rueff

“Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:

• I shall not fear anyone on Earth.
• I shall fear only God.
• I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.
• I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.
• I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.”
• Mahatma Gandhi

Life is a zoo in a jungle. - Peter De Vries

"It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny." Anthony Robbins

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. - Arthur Koestler

Life is a zoo in a jungle. - Peter De Vries

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. - Anais Nin

"He who gives when he is asked has waited too long." Seneca

"What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties." Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble." Carl Jung

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space... Hamlet, II, 2

What you think of me is none of my business. What is most important is what I think of myself. — Robert Kiyosaki

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. - Ben Hecht

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

• Nora Ephron

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - Somerset Maugham

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right. AE

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. E. Joseph Cossman

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again. Oscar Wilde

There is no greater sorrow than to recall a time of happiness in misery. -Dante

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. Howard Aiken

...you'll meet them in my book." Dad Sept0907

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Sir Winston Churchill

Logic can’t lure a dog away from a warm stove. — Hegel

STOLE MY IDEA: Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. - E. B. White

"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us in nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations." Rebecca West

This above all: to thine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.

"To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing." Elizabeth Bibesco

"They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price." Kahlil Gibran

"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."
Katherine Mansfield

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's." - Billy Wilder

Art comes after an incredible load of work and only one thing will see you through that work--passion. - Don Hahn

You got more past than future - SafeHouse

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.- Phillips Brooks

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. - Sir Winston Churchill

another somebody i thought was already gone... GANTONSO June 6 2012

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started." - Marcus Garvey

We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more. - Madame Swetchine

To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil by evil is evil. - Mohammed

wtf? If you can't see it, before you see it, you'll never see it. - Jack (Dr.) Graham

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go. - Richard Bach

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." - Carl Jung

If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place... If you get a chance,take it, If it changes your life,let it. Nobody said it would be easy they just said it would be worth it...

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Let your capital be simplicity and contentment." Henry David Thoreau

"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self, but the point is not only to get out, you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand." Henry James

"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." Mario Cuomo

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing." William James

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake. - Mark Twain

One reason people fail is pride. You have not because you ask not. (Remember this!) The wheel that squeaks gets the oil!! Never be afraid of rejection. Ask ask ask. Be willing to experience a season of rejection to create a eternity of gain. Knock on doors! Open your mouth! Some things last longer than rejection... Your goals and dreams! -said by 50Cent i think

MJFOX ON AUDI CLIP ON GNGs MADAGASCAR is QUOTE FROM CASUALTIES OF WAR
MJF Eriksson: Wait a minute... This goddamn thing is turning us on our heads. We’re getting it backwards. Because every day is a dose of bullshit. Just because we could all be blown away, everybody’s acting like we can do anything, and it don’t matter what we do. But I think it’s the other way around. The main thing is the opposite. Because we might die in the next second, maybe we gotta be extra careful what we do. Because maybe it matters more. Maybe it matters more than we even know.

            Wait a minute.
            This goddamn thing is turning us on our heads.
            We're getting it backwards.
            Because every day is a dose of bullshit.
            Just because we could all be blown away...
            ...everybody's acting like we can do anything.
            And it don't matter what we do.
            But I think it's the other way around. The main thing is the opposite.
            Because we might die in the next second...
            ...maybe we gotta be extra careful what we do.
            Because maybe it matters more.
            Maybe it matters more than we even know.

Everybody's acting like we can do anything, and it don't matter what we do... Maybe we gotta be extra careful because maybe it matters more than we even know

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves." ~ Andrew Jackson, 1767-1845, 7th US President, when forcing the closure of the Second Bank of the US in 1836 by revoking its charter.

Vladimir Vysotski was sung: “Lambs are marching in rows. Drums are rattling. The skins for these drums/ Are the lambs’own”ByL

perfect valor is to behave, without witnesses, as one would act were all the world watching. -Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Boatswain, a dog. – Lord Byron

“Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children—this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But souls which are pregnant—for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions?—wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice.” - Plato's Symposium, 208-209

Why I couldn’t write: I didn’t know at the time why nothing came out. Now it’s all so laughingly clear. It was because the story—my book—was so important to me. So much so that I didn’t give myself the space to mess it up. The business of writing books is a wild imaginative romp, at least I discovered it was for me. To do it you have to completely let go and white knuckle down for the ride. You can’t worry about tacking words together in just the right order and continually checking them against your story plan. First you must pull the giant cork out of your arse, only then can you sit down in the driver's seat. It’s a rush when you finally get there. It's not the dreaming part or the outlining part, certainly not the editing part, that's the magic. It's the writing. But you gotta get there.

"We are all pretending ... The important thing is to maintain a straight face." Maurice Valency

"Fearful as reality is, it is less fearful than evasions of reality ... Look steadfastly into the slit, pinpointed malignant eyes of reality as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts." Caitlin Thomas

St. Francis. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

But eagerly desire the greater gifts. And now I will show you the most excellent way. 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13, NIV)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities
no doubt have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with
your old nonsense.

This day is all that is
good and fair.
It is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on yesterdays.

Today is the seventh anniversary of "9/10" -- the day al-Qaeda terrorists, under ultimate direction from Afghanistan, did not fly airplanes into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, into a section of the Pentagon building in Washington, or even (with "lets roll" help from their hostages) into a field near Shanksville, in western Pennsylvania. We commemorate, on Sept. 10th, the last day in history in which such an event was inconceivable.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Friedrich Nietzsche

this is what my nightmares are made of..beauty... - GregA

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt. - Friedrich Nietzsche

'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?
Friedrich Nietzsche

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Fear is the mother of morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The doer alone learneth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?
Friedrich Nietzsche

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!
Friedrich Nietzsche

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

THE 50 MOST INSPIRING TRAVEL QUOTES OF ALL TIME

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” - Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson
5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” - Paul Fussell
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” - Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” - Lin Yutang
11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley
12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson
13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese
15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller
    16?A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” - Moslih Eddin Saadi
16. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence
17. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” - Freya Stark
18. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain
19. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard
20. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber
21. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” - Jawaharial Nehru
22. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” - Paul Theroux
23. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson
24. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by.” - Robert Frost
26. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu
27. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” - Charles Dudley Warner
28. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu
29. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” - James Michener
30. “The journey not the arrival matters.” - T. S. Eliot
31. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” - Tim Cahill
32. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” - Mark Twain
33. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” - Pat Conroy
    “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu
34. “Not all those who wander are lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien
35. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” - Benjamin Disraeli
36. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” - Maya Angelou
37. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” - Elizabeth Drew
38. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France
39. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” - Seneca
40. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” - William Least Heat Moon
41. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” - Lillian Smith
42. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” - Aldous Huxley
43. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark
44. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” - Rudyard Kipling
45. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” - Paul Theroux
46. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton
47. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” - Clifton Fadiman
48. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” - Carlo Goldoni
49. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

Petr Chaadaev
Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady (1829)
Letter One (excerpts)
…It is one of the most deplorable traits of our strange civilization that we are still discovering truths that are commonplace even among peoples much less advanced than we. This is because we have never moved in concert with the other peoples. We are not a part of any of the great families of the human race; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we have not the traditions of either. We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us…
Our memories reach back no further than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves. We move through time in such a singular manner that, as we advance, the past is lost to us forever. That is but a natural consequence of a culture that consists entirely of imports and imitation. Among us there is no internal development, no natural progress; new ideas sweep out the old, because they are not derived from the old but tumble down upon us from who knows where. We absorb all our ideas ready-made, and therefore the indelible trace left in the mind by a progressive movement of ideas, which gives it strength, does not shape our intellect. We grow, but we do not mature; we move, but along a crooked path, that is, one that does not lead to the desired goal. We are like children who have not been taught to think for themselves: when they become adults, they have nothing of their their own--all their knowledge is on the surface of their being, their soul is not within them. That is precisely our situation.
Peoples, like individuals, are moral beings. Their education takes centuries, as it takes years for that of persons. In a way, one could say that we are an exception among peoples. We are one of those nations, which do not seem to be an integral part of the human race, but exist only in order to teach some great lesson to the world.

Source: P. Ia Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis'ma, t. 1, (Moscow, 1991), p. 90, 92-93.

I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables.

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used
And wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung
No wine untasted.

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame.

And still
I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms
We cannot weather...

I had a dream my life would be
So different form this hell I'm living
so different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

THE WORLD IS MINE - unknown Author, sent by JUDY MAY 18 2013

Today, upon a bus, I saw a very beautiful woman
And wished I were as beautiful.
When suddenly she rose to leave,
I saw her hobble down the aisle.
She had one leg and wore a crutch.
But as she passed, she passed a smile.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I have two legs; the world is mine.

I stopped to buy some candy.
The lad who sold it had such charm.
I talked with him, he seemed so glad.
If I were late, it'd do no harm.
And as I left, he said to me,
"I thank you, you've been so kind.
It's nice to talk with folks like you.
You see," he said, "I'm blind."
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I have two eyes; the world is mine.

Later while walking down the street,
I saw a child I knew.
He stood and watched the others play,
but he did not know what to do.
I stopped a moment and then I said,
"Why don't you join them dear?"
He looked ahead without a word.
I forgot, he couldn't hear.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I have two ears; the world is mine.

With feet to take me where I'd go..
With eyes to see the sunset's glow.
With ears to hear what I'd know.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I've been blessed indeed, the world is mine.