I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
Random Quote
- “The most difficult thing is to know yourself.”
-- Thales - “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.”
-- Bertrand Russell (In Praise of Idleness) - “When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.”
-- Clarence Darrow - “All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. People are accustomed to believe and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences.”
-- John Stuart Mill (On Liberty and Utilitarianism) - “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-- Socrates - “Your life is what your thoughts make it.”
-- Marcus Aurelius - “People living deeply have no fear of death.”
-- Anais Nin - “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes - “The only problem in life is what to do next.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke - “You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
-- Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) - “It is difficult at times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them, because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
-- Anne Frank - “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another”
-- Immanuel Kant - “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.”
-- Leonardo da Vinci - “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-- Robert Heinlein - “If I were to be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or a scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.”
-- Albert Einstein - “Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.”
-- George Santayana - “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
-- Douglas Adams - “Those people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little sharp, staccato ideas such as ""I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget."" But they have no slow, big ideas.”
-- Brenda Ueland - “The cost of a thing is the amount of life that must be exchanged for it immediately and in the future.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “I find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.”
-- John Burroughs - “We are great fools. "He has passed his life in idleness," we say, "I have done nothing today." What!? Haven't you lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. ""Had I been put in a position to manage great affairs I would have shown what I could do."" Have you been able to think out and manage your life? You have performed the greatest work of all. In order to show and release her powers, Nature has no need of fortune; she shows herself equally on all levels, and behind a curtain as well as without one. To compose our characters is our duty, not to compose books, and to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, to rule, to lay up treasure, to build, are at most but little appendices and props.”
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne - “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
-- Robert Frost - “Nothing goes swifter than the years. Slow down and live this day to its fullest.”
-- Ovid - “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
-- Norman Cousins - “The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”
-- Bertrand Russell (In Praise of Idleness)