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.

Embrace humility in everything. Life isn’t out to get you, nor are your struggles your fault. Every defeat is just an angel, tugging at your

sleeve, telling you that you don’t have to keep banging your head

against the wall. Leave that striver there, trapped in his lonely

ambitions. Just walk away, and life in its vastness will embrace you.

Paul Weinfield

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

The curse of totalitarian governments is that they kill people for

telling them the truth; do that enough times, and you end up with

a nation of liars.

Journalist David von Drehle

Since experience is always shaped by our own expectations, there

is an opportunity to improve our lives by altering some of those expectations, and the confidence with which they are held.

Andy Clark, The Experience Machine

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

We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.

Denise Levertov, “Sojourns in the Parallel World”

Childhood itself is such a halfway house between imagination and reality.

Maria Popova, The Marginalian

The present is a feather on loan from the wings of time that only attention makes beautiful and only kindness valuable.

Maria Popova, An Almanac of Birds

It’s never too late to become yourself. Actress Sharon Stone

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of

non- pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients

with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing

effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative

and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are

deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature

are more powerful than any medication . . . The effects of nature’s

qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical

and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in

the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

Neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks

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