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.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but

there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Ursula Le Guin

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so

did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted

and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often

begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula Le Guin

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and

get more stuff.

George Carlin

Social learning — this jungle gym for training the plasticity of being

we call adaptation — may be the lever by which we lifted ourselves

up from the flatland of survival to the mountain of civilization, the key

that liberated us from the prison of our destiny as predators to

become poets.

Maria Popova

Indeed, nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent — baboons,

crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans — are big-brained social

generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.

Jonathan Meiberg

Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s

one who asks the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

To deny weaknesses is to be victimized by them and caught up

in lies.

Wallace Stegner

What these men were describing, I realized, was a pattern of path

breaking common to all living things: One caterpillar finds a new leaf,

and ten more follow its trail. By the time the eleventh arrives, the leaf

has been chewed down to its skeleton, and so the eleventh caterpillar grows hungry and sets off in a new direction. The same principle

applies to foraging ants and grazing herds, to fashion trends and stock markets, to traffic-clogged roads and eroded hiking paths.

Robert Moor, On Trails

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

Indian proverb

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