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.

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

The natural world is a spiritual house . . . Man walks there through forests of physical things that are also

spiritual things, that watch him with affectionate looks.

Charles Baudelaire

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

There are so many ways to change the sentences we have

been given.

Terry Tempest Williams

The stories we tell, the ways we think about the world have

huge consequences, and so do our actions. Ideas shape

reality and they can change the world.

Rebecca Solnit

They do and they have throughout history. BN

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki

“When the evidence shows a conspiracy theory is wrong,

then the evidence, by definition, must also be wrong — because the conspiracy theory must be right.” Quote from article detailing Trump’s six attempts to hire people to find evidence he won the 2020 election, author unknown

“I was very impressed with myself to have the head of

Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’ " (Interesting interpretation)

President Donald Trump re Tim Cook

The emerging fissure was of a different order. It brought

an increase in violence. A brutality that didn’t ask if it

was necessary or not.

Henning Mankell, The Man with the Mask (novel)