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.

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

Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness.

Elie Wiesel

Why do I write? What else could I do? I write to bear witness.

Elie Wiesel

It’s those who lie outside of ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

Malcolm Gladwell

What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history.

Henry Beston

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone

else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is

the door to the temple.

Mary Oliver

We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice.

Terry Tempest Williams

Since, as we have seen, the laws of nature have a way

of being altered from one generation of scientists to the

next, a little taste for the miraculous in this broad sense

will do us no harm. We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness.

We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats

that miracle.

Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

Will Rogers

It is the nature of the mind to live in the confines of its own

limits until you encounter something never imagined, some

great profusion of the heart that suddenly enlarges reality

and tasks you with being wholly alive.

Maria Popova

Nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own

superiority.

Benjamin Franklin

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and

ears. It was their final, most essential command.

George Orwell