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. Don't assume I live up to them, but they remind me of how I 
        want to try to think and live, giving me a direction I want to move toward. This page is                  dedicated to those little bon mots with the hope that some may serve others the way 
        they have me.


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         Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness. 

                                                                                     Elie Wiesel

        Why do I write? What else could I do? I write to bear witness. 
​  
                                                                                     Elie Wiesel

        ​It’s those who lie outside of ordinary experience who have the 
        most to teach us. 

                                                                           Malcolm Gladwell


          What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature         unexampled in human history. 
                                                                             Henry Beston

        I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone
        else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is 
        the door to the temple. 
                                                                               Mary Oliver

        We can choose to move like water rather than be molded         like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given         day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice.         

                                                              Terry Tempest Williams

     


        Since, as we have seen, the laws of nature have a way 
        of being altered from one generation of scientists to the 
        next, a little taste for the miraculous in this broad sense 
        will do us no harm. We forget that nature itself is one vast         miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. 
        We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats 
        that miracle.

                                     Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time

        It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole         government working for you. 

                                                                             Will Rogers


        It is the nature of the mind to live in the confines of its own 
        limits until you encounter something never imagined, some 
        great profusion of the heart that suddenly enlarges reality 
        and tasks you with being wholly alive. 
                                                                              Maria Popova


​        Nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own 
        superiority.
                                                                        Benjamin Franklin

        The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and 
        ears. It was their final, most essential command. 

                                                                             George Orwell



        Don't think it won't happen
        Just because it hasn't happened yet.         Jackson Browne
                                            (true of good things as well as bad)


        You never knew what I loved in you
        I don't know what you loved in me
        Maybe the picture of somebody 
        You were hoping I might be                      Jackson Browne


        Just do the steps that you’ve been shown
        By everyone you’ve ever known
        Until the dance becomes your very own.  Jackson Browne




          We can choose to move like water rather than be 
        molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on 
        any given day. It does not have to be one way, one 
        truth, one voice. 

                                                          Terry Tempest Williams

        A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to 
        be something forced. More naturally, as well as more         properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer 
        alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds,         stones and trees. 

                                                                         Iris Murdoch