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.


________________________________________________________



        “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)




        It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane 
        that you carried on the human heritage. 

                                                               George Orwell, 1984

        What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny 
        matters compared to what lies within us. 

                                                            Ralph Waldo Emerson


        I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of 
        myself if some people did. 

                                                                          Henry James 




        All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill  
        in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he 
        chooses to be so or not.

                                                                   Nathaniel Hawthorne


        Do not allow people to dim your shine because they are 
        blinded. Tell them to put some sunglasses on. 

                                                                                Lady Gaga


        Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be
        looking for it.

                                                               Henry David Thoreau



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


        If living is a practice, and I think it is, then saving 
        grief for the death of a loved one is like climbing Mt. 
        Everest before walking up the hill behind the house. 

                                                     Larry Ribnik, Man Alive!


        Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes 
        from never being satisfied. 

                                                                  Zadie Smith 



            [The] beauty of the world is an accusation that you are withholding your own beauty by being good as opposed to being yourself. 

                                                                                                                                                    Stephen Colbert re Mary Oliver's poetry

            We’ve never been so self-conscious about our selves as we seem to be these days. The popular magazines are filled with advice 
            on things to do with a self: how to find it, identify it, nurture it, protect it, even, for special occasions, weekends, how to lose it 
            transiently. There are instructive books, best sellers on self-realization, self-help, self-development. Groups of self-respecting 
            people pay large fees for three-day sessions together, learning self-awareness. Self-enlightenment can be taught in college 
            electives.

            You’d think, to read about it, that we’d only just now discovered selves. Having long suspected that there was something alive in 
            there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we’ve celebrated by giving it a real 
            name, [my] self. . .
                                                                                                             Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell - Notes of a Biology Watcher



            Among the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to realize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and 
            the wilderness, by comparison came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word 
            wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy. That switch allowed a new set of moral attitudes toward the 
            non-human world to take hold. Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses 
            something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes 
            and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself. 

                                                                                                                                                                            Robert Moor, On Trails

            Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully             understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full 
            of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who 
            see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense 
            potential. 

                                                                                                                                                                                              Nick Cave