I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
-- John Berger - “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 - “Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.”
-- Amy Lowell - “The target that I shoot for seems to move with every breath. I tighten all my arteries and make one last request. Devine creation hears me, and he squashes me with fear. I think that this exact thing happened to me just last year.”
-- Phish (Silent In The Morning) - “There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone - many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long.”
-- Richard Nelson Bolles - “They make slaughter, and they call it peace”
-- Tacitus - “Whether you affirm infallibility and deduce sovereignty from it or pose sovereignty first and derive infallibility from that, you are forced either way to recognize and sanction an absolute power. And the same result is imposed whether it be through oppression of governments or the reason of philosophers, whether you make the people or the king sovereign.”
-- Francois Guizot - “We thought we were fighting for the fatherland. We realized quickly it was for the bank vaults.”
-- Anatole France - “I am persuaded that no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire.”
-- Thomas Jefferson - “We do not lack communication, on the contrary we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”
-- Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari - “Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.”
-- Michael Crichton - “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.”
-- Paul Fussell - “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
-- Anatole France - “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
-- John Steinbeck - “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 - “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
-- Aldous Huxley - “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
-- Freya Stark - “. . .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 - “Charity is always help that is offered too late, just as revolution is help that is offered too soon.”
-- John Krich - “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
-- Jorge Luis Borges - “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.”
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, Vol II) - “It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
-- Aldous Huxley (This Timeless Moment) - “It is very much easier to be intolerant, angry, jealous and resentful than it is to be generous, patient, kind and considerate. Without question it takes far more thought, and far more work, to treat others from the standpoint of these virtues than from that of those vices, which is why the latter are so prevalent.”
-- A.C. Grayling (The last word on heroism - The Guardian - 9 March, 2002) - “A stupid insensibility to the events of human life necessarily extinguishes all that keen and earnest attention to the propriety of our own conduct, which constitutes the real essence of virtue.”
-- Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) - “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
-- Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)