Quotes--Food-for-Thought

I've been collecting quotes for over thirty years, things people have said that are wise, inspiring,

thought-provoking, or humorous that have had a nurturing and sustaining effect on my life and at

times helped make it seem like it's worth the effort, or at least got me through the day. I don't

claim to live up to them, but they remind me of how I want to think and live. This page is dedicated

to those little bon mots with the hope that some may serve others the way they have me.

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the

quarrel ourselves, poetry.

W B Yeats

You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art

to see your soul.

George Bernard Shaw

Stick your neck out. Guillotines went out of fashion a couple

centuries ago.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous . . .The major advances

in civilizations are processes that all but wreck the societies in which

they occur.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas

In general, human societies are not innovative. They are hierarchical

and ritualistic. Suggestions for change are greeted with suspicion; they imply an unpleasant future variation in ritual and hierarchy . . . And yet

there are times when societies must change.

Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

Mama exhorted all of her children at every Seek not to

opportunity to jump at the sun. We might Follow in the

not land on the sun, but at least we would Footsteps of men

get off the ground. Of old; seek what

They sought.

Novelist/anthropologist Zora Neale

Hurston Matsuo Basho

The great payoff of knowing the boundaries of our being is the wise

wise discrimination of knowing when and whether to push them in

order to grow.

Maria Popova

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

Indian proverb

We need the tonic of wildness. . . At the same time that we are earnest

to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious

and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough

of nature. . . We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some

life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Henry David Thoreau

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. George Carlin

Sometimes you get applause just for not being dead. George Carlin

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our

exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the

place for the first time. Only those who will risk going too far

can possibly find out how far one can go.

T S Eliot

Real liberation becomes possible for me only when I have

done all that I was able to do, when I have devoted myself

to a thing and participated in it to the utmost. If I withdraw

from participation, I am amputating the corresponding part

of my psyche.

Carl Jung

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject

constantly before me and wait ‘til the first dawnings open slowly,

by little and little, into a full and clear light.

Isaac Newton

Never say higher or lower. Say more complicated.

Charles Darwin

We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.

Denise Levertov, “Sojourns in the Parallel World”

It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise, we’re going

out the way we came in.

Playwright Tom Stoppard

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

Playwright Tom Stoppard