Favorite quotations, 2

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
- Ernest Hemingway
(From A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, NY, 1966)

Books are attracted to me. They make a beeline for me, and stick to me. I have been so fond of them that at last they have begun to reciprocate. In my hands books burst like ripe fruit. Like magic flowers they unfold their petals to show me the vital thought, the suggestive word, the confirming quotation, the decisive illustration.
- Sergei Eisenstein

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul.
- Simone Weil

We see things not as they are, but as we are.
- The Talmud

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful;
he studies it because he delights in it,
and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
If nature were not beautiful,
it would not be worth knowing,
and if nature were not worth knowing,
life would not be worth living.
- Henri Poincaré

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
- Joseph Conrad

Believe that none of the effort you put into coming closer to God is ever wasted - even if in the end you don't achieve what you are striving for.
- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.
- Will Rogers

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
- Henri Bergson

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
- Albert Pike

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

The ultimate test of a man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
- Gaylord Nelson

Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
- George Bernard Shaw

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
- Derek Bok

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln

One who loves must learn fear. One who fears must learn love.
The thinker must do. The doer must think.
The pacifist must fight, the fighter must find peace.
If you flow as a river, burn as a fire. If you burn as a furnace, flow as a river.
If you fly as a bird, sit firm as a rock. If you sit firmly, then fly as a bird.
Be a fire that flows.
A rock that flies.
Love with fear and fear with love.
For we are not fire, not water, not air, not rocks, not thoughts, not deeds, not fear, not love. We are G-dly beings.
- Rabbi M. M. Schneerson

When you come to the end of all the light you know,
and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown,
faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen:
Either you will be given something solid to stand on
or you will be taught to fly.
- Edward Teller

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
- Johann Goethe
(John Anster's translation of Faust)

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome K. Jerome

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
- Mignon McLaughlin

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
- James D. Miles

In our thinking...we attribute to this concept of the bodily object a significance, which is to high degree independent of the sense impression which originally gives rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object a real existence. ...By means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations...appear to us as stronger and more unalterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed.
-Albert Einstein

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.
- Buddha

The right time to show your good character is when you are pestered by somebody weaker than you.
- Buddha

I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them.
- Pablo Picasso

This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
- William Shakespeare

If the world is cold make it your business to build fires.
- Horace Traubel

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.
- Buddha

Strive to realize a state of inward happiness, independent of circumstances.
- J.P. Greaves

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
- Helen Keller

I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I know)
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
- Rudyard Kipling, in Just So Stories

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
- Marie Curie

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
- Richard Feynman

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.
- Baruch Spinoza

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
- Frank Outlaw

Creativity is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift to God.
- Bob Moawad

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
- Henry David Thoreau

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
- Charles Kingsley

I have always believed that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
- Hermann Hesse

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
- Leo Tolstoy

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
- Lao Tzu

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
- T. H. White, in The Once and Future King

What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.
- Samuel Johnson

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short... if one follows patterns.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
- Frederick Douglass

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
- Carl Sagan

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.
- Leonardo DaVinci

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...
and I'm all out of bubblegum.
- Nada, in They Live (1988) by John Carpenter

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where the words come out
From the depth of truth
Where the tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
In ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my father
Let my country awake.
- Rabindranath Tagore (from Gitanjali)

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.
- Socrates

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.
-Albert Einstein

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.
-Kahlil Gibran

To find yourself, think for yourself.
- Socrates

The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
- Baha'u'llah

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
- Socrates

For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
- John Louis von Neumann

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates

It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
- Kurt Vonnegut

All ads do the same: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
- David Foster Wallace

Beginnings are hard. For good reason. If they were easy, we would prowl into each new venture like a snug fat cat.
When you begin pent up in an iron cage, a new life emerges. A tiger that breaks through the door of its cage and pounces with a vengeance.
Bless those cages, those impossible brick walls, those rivers of fire that lie at the outset of each worthwhile journey. Without them we would be only as powerful as we appear.
- Rabbi M. M. Schneerson