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.

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

The Declaration of Independence

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter

to build one.

Former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn

The people only have one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain

A person is a perceptual ongoingness perpetually mistaking

itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity

or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking our

selves. Composing a life as pages of time that keep turning is

the great creative act we are here for.

Maria Popova

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the

limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for.

Maria Popova

The winners forget, but the victims have terribly long memories.

John Le Carre

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness

of a child at play.

Heraclitus

It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact.

Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind

of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for

the human spirit.

Bertrand Russell

No one can take joy that is passed away from you. It’ll be

there in your heart to live on when the dark days come.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.

BB King

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life

we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect

it in our lives to come. . . There is no means of testing which

decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor

going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal

for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of

something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch

that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

Milan Kundera

We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of

what we might have it in ourselves to be or do… We share

our lives with the people we have failed to be.

Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The

myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual

falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained.

Adam Phillips