Thoughts

Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Then when you do criticize them, you'll be a mile away, and have their shoes.

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease. -- Bill Maher

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.

Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him. --Art Buchwald

Homeschooling: not just for scary religious people. ~Buffy

I'm very loyal in a relationship. Any relationship. When I go out with my mom, I don't look at other moms. I don't go "Ooooh, I wonder what her macaroni and cheese tastes like." -- Garry Shandling

The main trouble is there are too many people who don't know where they're going and they want to get there too fast! -The Bishop's Wife

Act honestly, and answer boldly. - Danish proverb

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. -Eleanor Roosevelt

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. ---Gloria Steinem

Keep yourself to yourself. --Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers

Making fun of respectability is the easiest form of wit. -Double Wedding

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. --Henry David Thoreau

Forget love, I'd rather fall in chocolate.

The world needs a good dose of eccentrics. Why not be one?

Sarcasm is just one more service we offer.

I'm listening to my inner monologue.

The highway of life is full of flat squirrels that couldn't make up their minds.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it!

CANNIBAL: Someone who is fed up with people.

Leave me alone! I'm living happily ever after!

The more people I meet, the more I like my cat.

Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.

Don't take life so seriously... it isn't permanent!

Of course I don't look busy! I did it right the first time!

If I wanted to hear the pitter-patter of little feet, I'd put shoes on my cat.

I'm not opinionated I'm just always right.

Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.

Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all mischief you are able to upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend. – Saadi

There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim. -Dennis Miller

Nothing is more foolish than to talk of frivolous things seriously; but nothing is wittier than to make frivolities serve serious ends. --Erasmus

I can live for two months on a good compliment. ~Mark Twain

There is nothing so absurd but if you repeat it often enough people will believe it. -Dr. William James

You don't have to prove someone wrong to do what you know is right. ~Joshua Harris

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson. ~Vernon Law

Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked. ~Lord Chesterfield

When I have learnt to love God better than I do my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. ~C.S. Lewis

He who lives well is the best preacher. --Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Tell me with whom you are contending and I'll tell you who you are. -Goethe

I am always ready to learn, though I do not always like being taught. ~Winston Churchill

It is more difficult, and calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one. -Horace Mann

In all matters, one must consider the end. ~Jean de la Fontaine, Fables, "Le Renard at le Bouc"

Only the shallow know themselves. -Oscar Wilde

I'm all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. Solomon Short

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." Mark Twain

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. Oscar Wilde

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. John Lennon

We must be our own before we can be another's. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind. Alphonse Bertillon

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality." T. S. Eliot

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche

All that we are not stares back at what we are. Auden

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. Mark Twain

Progress is a comfortable disease. E. E. Cummings

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Faulkner

Remember, when someone annoys you, It takes 42 muscles in your face to frown, but, it only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and smack the jerk upside the head.

"There is no room for pity, of anything. In a bleeding heart I should find only exhilaration in the richness of the red." -Elizabeth Smart

"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy." -- Cynthia Realms

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy...neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. --John W. Gardner

"We are all islands, but in a common sea." -Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. -Soren Kierkegaard

"For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream." Van Gogh

Reading maketh a full man ... and writing an exact man. -Sir Francis Bacon

Inner Nuances Foster Journeys

Only the shallow know themselves. -Oscar Wilde

I'm all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. Solomon Short

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. George Bernard Shaw

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." Mark Twain

Sipping a cup of tea, going for a morning walk, doing your work - all these small activities make up your living. And each part, each moment of living, is meaningful. You just have to be there; otherwise, who is going to experience the meaning? People go on drinking tea, but they never are there; their minds are wandering all over the world. Osho Talks - Meaning of Life

In describing my experience I am recording not what happened or what exists, but how I perceive it. In doing so I define myself. As I create my diary, I create myself. Tristine Rainer

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Faulkner

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance. Bruce Barton

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. John Cheever

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition. Henry Miller

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. Oscar Wilde

Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent. Bruno Jasienski Yasensky

Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd. William Congreve

Progress is a comfortable disease. -e. e. cummings

Lust is the cause of generation Appetite is the support of life Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and Fraud the preservation of its instruments. Leonardo Da Vinci

Has it ever occurred to you that there might be a difference between having an open mind and having holes in one's head? Richard Schultz, on soc.culture.jewish

The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them. William Clayton

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

I tell you: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

All that we are not stares back at what we are. Auden

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I'm right. Moliere

Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it. Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. Mark Twain

A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems shorter than a minute. But tell that same man to sit on a hot stove for a minute, it is longer than any hour. That's relativity. Albert Einstein

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. John Lennon

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. Winston Churchill

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. Winston Churchill

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. Mark Twain

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. Albert Einstein

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within. Mahatma Gandhi

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Martin Luther King

Sex appeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got. Sophia Loren

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Isaac Newton

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind. Alphonse Bertillon

All charming people have something to hide, usually it is their total dependance on the appreciation of others. Cyril Connolly

We must be our own before we can be another's. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you go to women, take your whip with you. -Nietzsche

Man is, then, only disguise, falsehood, hypocrisy-both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others; and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart. ~Blaise Pascal

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." -Oscar Wilde

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze. - D.H. Lawrence

Tell me with whom you are contending and I'll tell you who you are. -Goethe

Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all mischief you are able to upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend. – Saadi

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson. ~Vernon Law

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway." Elbert Hubbard

Men make their own history but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing; they make it under circumstances directly transmitted from the past. -Karl Marx

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. Emily Dickinson

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves. Charles Caleb Colton

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. -Robert Frost

It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them. -T.S. Eliot

"If one is something one really does not need to make anything- and one nonetheless does very much." Nietzsche

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." Robert Heinlein

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. Carl Bard

Don't solve your problems, dissolve your problems - so that they should not recur again. Yogi Bhajan

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered. C.S. Lewis

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them." - Kahlil Gibran

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take everything I have, or could have, or anything the world could offer, I am still empress of a new-found land, that neither Columbus nor Cortez could have equalled, even in their instigating dream. -Elizabeth Smart

What you think is the sirens singing to lure you to your doom is only the voice of the inevitable, welcoming you after so long a wait. I was made only for you. -Elizabeth Smart

I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it. It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on. Did I say suspicion? No. No. No. It's nothing. I love you. A slight feeling of nausea, that's all. -Elizabeth Smart

Injure me, betray me, but only make me sure of the love, for all day and all night, away from him and with him, everywhere and always, that is my gravity, and the apples (which ben ripe in my gardayne) fall only towards that. -Elizabeth Smart

I see it is a summer's evening above. My lover lies under the linden-tree kissing Tomorrow with his mouth that was all mine. -Elizabeth Smart

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance- it is the illusion of knowledge. Daniel J.. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress Emeritus

Thou ignorant monster, how deformed dost thou look! -Love's Labours Lost

Where nothing wants that want itself doth seek. -Love's Labours Lost

The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together. -All's Well that Ends Well

If you would not be forgotten,
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
-Ben Franklin

"...love must have some future, and for us there were only moments." -Albert Camus, La Peste

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree.
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
W.B. Yeats, 'Down by the Salley Gardens'

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.
~Thomas Moore

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. -Antoine De Saint Expurery

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am vast.
I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves. - Charles Caleb Colton

"For the artist the real joy is in the creation of the thing. When you feel something growing under your hands, you grow with it. You're alive, the energy flows. When it's finished, you stop growing. You stop living. You only live for the next act of creation." -Joan D. Vinge: The Snow Queen

The Moving Finger writes;
and, having writ, Moves on:
nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A good reputation may be as hard to shed as a bad one but it certainly helps a lot more in court.

"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil." Max Lerner

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. -From Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim. Dennis Miller

Nothing is more foolish than to talk of frivolous things seriously; but nothing is wittier than to make frivolities serve serious ends. - Erasmus

The fate of all extremes is such,
Men may be read, as well as books, too much.
To observations which ourselves we make,
We grow more partial for th' observers sake.
~Alexander Pope

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. -Khalil Gibran.

Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. ~Mark Twain

Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies. - Marchal Villars

Laughter is the closest distance between two people. - Victor Borge

He used to say that it was better to have one friend of great value than many friends who were good for nothing. - Diogenes Lartius

The past is not dead. It is not even past. -Faulkner

"Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes." --James Baldwin

Writing is a struggle against silence - Carlos Fuentes

Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life. - Benjamin Disraeli

A precedent embalms a principle. - Benjamin Disraeli

As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. - Benjamin Disraeli

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them. - Benjamin Disraeli

I write to understand as much as to be understood. - Elie Wiesel

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read. - Gloria Steinem

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth. - Benjamin Disraeli

Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes. - Benjamin Disraeli

The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do. - Benjamin Disraeli

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. -Benjamin Disraeli

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. - Benjamin Disraeli, Speech at the House of Commons, January 24, 1860

I love you - and yet I do not presume to know you
Your secret self is a beautiful mystery
upon which my heart will not intrude
~by Nanushka (Nan Whitcomb)

When life hands you a lemon, say, "Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else ya got?" ~Henry Rollins

Life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.
~Rita Rudner

To be loved is nothing. I want to be preferred. -- Gide

If you're going through hell, keep going.
~Winston Churchill

"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot grasp the fact that a human foot is more noble than the shoe and human skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed."
--Michelangelo

"It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure--the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below."
--President James A. Garfield, commencement address to Hiram College, 1880.

"In a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress thus did the virus of a culture, snobbish and alien to the land, perform its work of disintegratiion; and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot...when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable."
--Louis Sullivan in his autobiography, 1924; regarding the Lincoln Memorial and other Greek/Roman inspired American architecture

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson

People always say how you should be yourself. Like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something. Like you know what it is, even. - My So-Called Life

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. - Mark Twain

"'Dress up' [...] puts feminine narcissism in concrete form; it is a uniform and an adornment; but means of it the woman who is deprived of doing anything feels that she expresses what she is. To care for her beauty, to dress up, is a kind of work that enables her to take possession of her person as she takes possession of her home through housework; her ego then seems chosen and recreated by herself. [...] While some women, however, assert that they 'dress for themselves,' we have seen that even in narcissism being observed by others is implied. [...] A husband is not good in this role of witness. Here against his requirements are equivocal. If his wife is too attractive he gets jealous; but ever husband [...] wants his wife to do him credit. [...] We have seen that in marriage erotic and social values are not well reconciled, and this antagonism is reflected here."
"A naive young girl is caught by the gleam of virility, [...] but what she always wants is for her lover to represent the essence of manhood.
Familiarity is often sufficient to destroy his prestige; it may collapse at the first kiss, or in daily association, or during the wedding night. Love at a distance, however, is only a fantasy, not a real experience. The desire for love becomes a passionate love only when it is carnally realized. Inversely, love can arise as a result of physical intercourse; in this case the sexually dominated woman acquires an exalted view of a man who at first seemed to her quite insignificant. But it often happens that a woman succeeds in deifying none of the men she knows. Love has a smaller place in woman's life than has often been supposed. Husband, children, home, amusements, social duties, vanity, sexuality, career, are much more important. Most women dream of a grand amour, a soul-searing love. They have known substitues, they have been close to it; it has come to them in partial, bruised, ridiculous, imperfect, mendacious forms; but very few have truly dedicated their lives to it. The grandes amoureuses are most often women who have not frittered themselves away in juvenile affairs; they have first accepted teh traditional feminine destiny: husband, home, children; of they have known pitiless solitude, or they have banked on some enterprise that has been more or less of a failure. And when they glimpse the opportunity to salvage a disappointing life by dedicating it to some superior person, they desperately give themselves up to this hope. [...] No other aim in life which seemed worth while was open to them, love was their only way out.
[...] Even if they can choose independence, this road seems the most attractive to a majority of women: it is agonizing for a woman to assume responsibility for her life. Even the male, when adolescent, is quite willing to turn to older women for guidance, education, mothering; but customary attitudes, the boy's training, and his own inner imperatives forbid him to content himself in the end with the easy solution of abdication; to him such affairs with older women are only a stage through which he passes. It is man's good fortune--in adulthood as in early childhood--to be obliged to take the most arduous roads, but the surest; it is a woman's misfortune to be surrounded by almost irresistible temptations; everything incites her to follow the easy slopes; instead of being invited to fight her own way up, she is told that she has only to let herself slide and she will attain paradises of enchantment. ("She cheerfully believes these lies because they invite her to follow the easy slope [...] which is the temptation of every existent in the anxiety of liberty.") When she perceives that she has been duped by a mirage, it is too late; her strength has been exhausted in a losing venture.
The psychoanalysts are wont to assert that woman seeks the father image in her lover; but it is because he is a man, not because he is a father, that he dazzles the girl child, and every man shares this magical power. Woman does not long to reincarnate one individual in another, but to reconstruct a situation: that which she experienced as a little girl, under adult protection. She was deeply integrated with home and family, she knew the peace of quasi-passivity."
"Woman [...] has been deceived in being persuaded that her worth is priceless. The truth is that for man she is an amusement, a pleasure, company, an inessential boon; he is for her the meaning, the justification of her existence. The exchange, therefore, is not of two items of equal value. [...] When she succeeds in killing time, it is a benefit to er: the man's prescence is pure profit [...]--she will not yield her body unless her lover will take hours of conversation and "going out" into the bargain. A balance is reached if, on the whole, the cost does not seem too high to the man, and this depends, of course, on the strength of his desire and the importance he gives to what is to be sacrificed. But if the woman demands--offers--too much time, she becomes wholly intrusive. [...] He always has "other things to do" with his time; whereas she has time to burn; and he considers much of the time she gives him not as a gift but as a burden. [...] She feels she is behaving like a beggar when she is convinced of the high value of her gifts, and that humiliates her. [...] She will even be very happy if she has occasion to show her resentment..."
"Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the peculiarities that identify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the significance placed upon them."
"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.
[...]In those combats where they think they confront one another, it is really against the self that each one struggles, projecting into the partner that part of the self which is repdiated; instead of living out the ambiguities of their situation, each tries to make the other bear the abjection and tries to reserve the honor for the self."
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.
~William Shakespeare

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
~William Shakespeare

"My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success." - Sir Isaac Newton

"To be ignorant of the past is to forever be a child." - Cicero





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