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Quotations of the Day: August 2008
August 31, 2008
Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. —William Saroyan
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom. —John Locke
August 28, 2008
Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend. —J.W. von Goethe
August 27, 2008
Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, cheerfulness of mind, and these make us precious to our friends. —Thomas Jefferson
August 26, 2008
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. —T.S. Eliot
August 25, 2008
What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite. —Ivan Turgenev
August 24, 2008
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. —Jorge Luis Borges
August 23, 2008
Degenerate sons and daughters, / Life is too strong for you— / It takes life to love Life. —Edgar Lee Masters
August 22, 2008
In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. —Ray Bradbury
August 21, 2008
Those who love to be feared fear to be loved, and they themselves are more afraid than anyone, for whereas other men fear only them, they fear everyone. —Saint Francis de Sales
We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American. —Bill Clinton
August 18, 2008
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well. —A. Bronson Alcott
August 17, 2008
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired. —Martha Graham
August 16, 2008
Winning brought me a wonderful sense of completeness. —Tenley Albright
August 15, 2008
This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary. —T.E. Lawrence
August 14, 2008
A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. —Henry David Thoreau
August 13, 2008
He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing. —Thomas Carlyle
August 12, 2008
O beautiful for heroes proved / In liberating strife, / Who more than self their country loved, / And mercy more than life! —Katharine Lee Bates
August 11, 2008
So you wish to conquer in the Olympic games, my friend? Then in the conflict itself you are likely enough to dislocate your wrist or twist your ankle, to swallow a great deal of dust, or to be severely thrashed, and, after all these things, to be defeated. —Epictetus
August 10, 2008
The only way I was going to make a difference for myself or any other black person is to say the hurdles were there and do what I had to do. —Wyomia Tyus
August 9, 2008
And now in one hour’s time I’ll be out there again. I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor four feet wide with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. —Colin Welland
August 8, 2008
Piles of gold are not as good as stores of grain. —Chinese proverb
August 7, 2008
It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. —Deng Xiaoping
August 6, 2008
Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. —Richard Hofstadter
August 5, 2008
It’s hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once—when I was poor. —Larry Holmes
August 4, 2008
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity. —Percy Bysshe Shelley
August 3, 2008
And I shall find some girl perhaps, / And a better one than you, / With eyes as wise, but kindlier, / And lips as soft, but true, / And I daresay she will do. —Rupert Brooke
August 2, 2008
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. —James Baldwin
August 1, 2008
I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. —Herman Melville
