Mark Twain
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.…
Month: March 2005
Elizabeth I
If your heart fails thee, climb not at all. in response to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall. both being scratched in a glass window pane with a diamond ring.…
Henry David Thoreau
What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.…
John Muir
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe.…
Shel Silverstein
Early Bird Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early bird, But if you’re a worm, sleep late.…
G K Chesterton
The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.…
Piet Hein
Astro-Gymnastics Go on a starlit night, stand on your head, leave your feet dangling outwards into space, and let the starry firmament you tread be, for the moment, your elected base. Feel Earth’s colossal weight of ice and granite, of molten magma, water, iron, and lead; and briefly hold this strangely solid planet balanced upon your strangely solid head.…
Michelangelo
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.…
Winston Churchill
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.…
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.…
William Blake
The Tiger Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart, And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? and what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?…
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.…
George Macdonald
Simply to do what we ought is an altogether higher diviner more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the most worshiping temple or dream out the most enchanting commotion of melody and harmony.…
Le Guin
Love doesn’t sit there like a stone. It has to be made like bread; Remade all the time, …Made new.…
G K Chesterton
The conservative spirit of the child always makes him think of the latest as the last.…
Paul Valery
One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.…
Piet Hein
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and you’re hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No – not so that chance shall decide the affair while you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping.…
Robert Browning
Ah, but a man’s grasp should exceed his reach, Or what’s a heaven for?…
Eleanor Roosevelt
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.…
Italian Proverb
When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box.…
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.…
Robert A. Heinlein
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.…
R L Stevenson
Requiem Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.…
Rene Descartes
If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.…
Leo Tolstoy
Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.…
Thomas A. Edison
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.…