Security and certainty

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

~ Helen Keller

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

~ George Bernard Shaw

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

~ Albert Einstein

Christmas

If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.

~Yeshua Cristos, as reported by John, son of Zebedee

 

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

~Luke, the Historian in the account he recorded for his friend Theophilus, Chapter 2: 1-7

 

Art vs Science

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers
~ Pablo Picasso

Common Sense and Wisdom

I've always been in the right place and time. Of course, I steered myself there.

~ Bob Hope

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

~ W.C. Fields

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

~ Job 28:28

~Psalm 111:10

~ Proverbs 1:7

~ Proverbs 9:10

~ Proverbs 15:33

~ Isaiah 33:6

~ Micah 6:9

of knowledge and learning

"Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."

~ Plato

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?"

~ Cicero

movie quote

So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.

George Lucas, Senator Amidala in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Election Day

"Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good: 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."

-- John Quincy Adams

Art and Science

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection...That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
~ Isaac Asimov

Liberty

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

— Benjamin Franklin

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

— John Adams

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

— David Hume

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty."

— John F. Kennedy

What is knowledge?

Information is not knowledge.

~ Albert Einstein

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

~ Niels Bohr

Is God 'there' to help us?

Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God's blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices—saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather, we should pray and worry earnestly whether we are on God's side.

- Abraham Lincoln

Beware being right with a passion...

In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.

— Publilius Syrus

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

— William Penn

Metaphors

"Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible."

— Johan Huizinga

"A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on."

— G.C. Lichtenberg

Philosophies for getting better

Success is the culmination of failures, mistakes, false starts, confusion and the determination to keep going anyway.

-- Nick Gleason

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

-- Winston Churchill

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing is to supply light and not heat.

— Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)

Successful technologies

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

~ Isaac Asimov

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

~ Richard P. Feynman

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

~ Francis Bacon

the whole of creation, and truth

Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful...
... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

~ Robinson Jeffers

Evil spreads with the wind; truth is capable of spreading even against it.

~ Paramahansa Yogananda

knowledge, wisdom, and rights

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

~ Jimmy Wales

A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.

~ John C. Maxwell

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

~ Alexander Hamilton

We bring small daily blessings

"Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day."

~ Benjamin Franklin

"Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage."

~ Albert Schweitzer

What happens if I say this is a quote for all of us?

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

- Christopher Morley

Dream of the Power of Love

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

~ Edgar Allan Poe

"What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love... I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go."

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

What goals should we pursue?

I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

- Mitch Hedberg

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

~ Walter M. Miller, Jr.

An Insider's View of War

"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end."

~ Douglas MacArthur

Civilization as an excuse for incivility

"If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

~ Lewis Carroll

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

~ Robert E. Howard

Lie awake?

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."

~Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in "Peanuts" US cartoonist (1922 - 2000)

writers vs. authors

"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

~ Colette

Risk vs Fear

If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed.
~ Charles Lindbergh

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
~ Thomas Edison

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

What leads us / what makes a dark age

"What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us—what convictions, what
courage, what faith—win or lose."

~ Adlai Stevenson

"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it."

-- James A. Michener

Freedom vs. Tyranny

He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true.

~ Thomas More

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

~ Ronald Reagan

Types of discontent

There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.

~ John Ruskin

Man is not once-and-for-all

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...

~ Karl Jaspers

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

~ Henry Adams

In search of Truth

I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.

~ George Washington

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

~ Anaïs Nin

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

~ Galileo Galilei

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

~ Boris Pasternak

Cowboy Wisdom

[Emailed to me by Gene, who also appreciates quote collections. Source unknown.]

A Cowboy's Guide to Life

* Don't name a pig you plan to eat.

* Your fences need to be horse high, pig tight, and bull strong.

* Life ain't about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.

* Keep skunks and bankers and lawyers at a distance.

* Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.

* A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.

* Words that soak into your ears are whispered ... not yelled.

* Meanness don't jest happen overnight.

* Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads.

* Don't sell your mule to buy a plow.

* Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.

* It don't take a very big person to carry a grudge.

* You cannot unsay a cruel word.

* Every path has a few puddles.

* When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.

* The best sermons are lived, not preached.

* Most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gonna happen anyway.

* Don't judge folks by their relatives.

* Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

* Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll enjoy it a second time.

* Don't interfere with somethin' that ain't botherin' you none.

* Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

* It's better to be a has-been than a never-was.

* The easiest way to eat crow is while it's still warm. The colder it gets, the harder it is to swaller.

* If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.

* If it don't seem like it's worth the effort, it probably ain't.

* It don't take a genius to spot a goat in a flock of sheep.

* Sometimes you get and sometimes you get got.

* The biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with watches you shave his face in the mirror every mornin'.

* If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.

* Don't worry about bitin' off more 'n you can chew; your mouth is probably a whole lot bigger'n you think.

* Only cows know why they stampede.

* Always drink upstream from the herd.

* If you're ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there with ya.

* Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.

Success: After and Before

External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.

~ Amy Tan

Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.

~ Michael Jordan

Need a good idea?

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

~ Linus Pauling

True Patriotism

Our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: 'Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'

~ Carl Schurz