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 make the mistake of assuming I live up to any of 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.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well

as to others.

Seamus Heany

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.

It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.

Anne Lamott

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

Rhaina Cohen

You cannot control anything. You cannot order or command

everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect

your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot

be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married.

You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or

relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.

Brian Doyle

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.

Then I realized who was telling me this.

Comedian Emo Phillips

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom . . .

Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite:

counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a

rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified

and whole.

Hermann Hesse

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn

to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it. Everything that

happens is either a blessing, which is also a lesson, or a lesson, which

is also a blessing.

Polly Berrien Berends

Hope is like a path in the countryside.

At first there is no path,

But if enough people He had the faults of his virtues.

walk in the same direction

the path appears. Lu Xun John Steinbeck

I pray that if I’ve done my work so that when I’ve gone from here, and

all the turmoil, the wreckage and the rumble, and through when someone

finds themselves digging through the ruins, I pray that somewhere in that wreckage they’ll find me, somewhere in that wreckage that they can use something I’ve left behind, and if I’ve done that, then I’ve accomplished something in life.

James Baldwin to his brother David near the end of his life

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it

shines.

Leonard Cohen on hard work and not quitting

before you know what you have

History is not something that takes place “elsewhere”; it takes place

here; we all contribute to making it.

Vaclav Havel

We ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen

to us, they happen through us . . . Our individual tensions are simply

the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind.

Scottish philosopher John Macmurray

First they fascinate the fools. Then they muzzle the intelligent.

Bertrand Russell

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be

in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of

the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to

comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether

it shines.

Leonard Cohen

Rich people are careless. They break things. F Scott Fitzgerald

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude

to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much

necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing

plant and for the soul of the child.

Carl Jung

[The] man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, like one

uprooted, has no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life

which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. This plaything of his reason never grips his vitals.

Carl Jung

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the

core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

Max Lerner

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

J. D. Salinger

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.

Ethel Barrymore