Pierre's Almanack II

Quotation Ring Homepage, including joining info Next site in the Quotation Ring A random Quotation Ring site View a list of all Quotation Ring sites Quotation Ring

I admit it. I'm an Internet addict. Here's some quotations collected from alt.quotations and a few other places.

Volume I
Volume III
Volume IV

  1. "If at first you don't succeed, don't skydive."
    --Anon
    From Quotes regarding life , another Quotation ring member..
  2. "You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live now."
    - Joan Baez
  3. "We're not lost. We're locationally challenged."
    John M. Ford
  4. "I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction... It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way"
    - Thomas Merton wrote in a letter July 28, 1960
  5. "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, an it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
    -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  6. "Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."
    -Frank Zappa
  7. "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle."
    -Phillips Brooks

    "Reverend Phillips Brooks, a preacher at Trinity Church, Harvard graduate, advocate for social service, and lover of humanity." -- died 1898..

  8. "I felt like poisoning a monk."
    -Umberto Eco on why he wrote the novel The Name of the Rose
  9. "To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart - and to keep them in parallel vigor one must exercise, study and love."
    -Karl von Bonstetten
  10. "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
    -Bernard Berenson
  11. "Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well."
    -Mohandas K. Gandhi
  12. "I think of a story Sean brought home from CYO camp, about an Indian brave so in love with a maiden from the tribe across the lake he tries to swim over to her and drowns. The punchline is, 'And from that day to this, it has been known as Lake Stupid.'"
    -Mark O'Donnell, Getting Over Homer

    From the Love Blender

  13. "Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage."
    -Joseph Campbell
  14. "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
    -Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
  15. "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches."
    -Rainer Maria Rilke
  16. "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
    -Henry Ward Beecher
  17. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
    -Anatole France

    Thanks to John Starett

  18. "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
    -Albert Einstein
  19. "By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you will become very happy; if you get a bad one, you will become a philosopher--and that is good for any man. "
    -Socrates
  20. "At the moment of the experience, you and the taste of tea are one. There is no differentiation. The tea is you, and you are the tea. There is not the drinker of tea and the tea being enjoyed, because there is no distinction between subject and object in the real experience. When we start to distinguish subject and object, the experience disappears, and only our concepts remain. THE WORLD OF ZEN IS THE WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE WITHOUT CONCEPTS."
    -Thich Nhat Hahn
  21. "My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia."
    -Dame Edna Everage
  22. "When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty.'"
    -Theodore Roosevelt
  23. "I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees."
    - Heinrich Heine
  24. "Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable"
    -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
  25. "Pour n' être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
    enivrez-vous ; enivrez-vous sans cesse!
    Du vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
    -Baudelaire Merci a PPP.
  26. "An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy."
    Benjamin Stolberg
  27. "First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others."
    -Thomas A Kempis, 1420
  28. "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become president; I'm beginning to believe it."
    -Clarence Darrow
  29. "Mistakes live in the neighbourhood of truth and therefore delude us."
    -Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Poet (1861-1941)
  30. "Live for today,Work like you don't need money; love like you've been hurt; dance like nobody's watching." -Christine Comaford, managing director of Artemis Ventures

    One of the top 25 Women of the Web for 1999

  31. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
    -John Benfield
  32. "The best way to solve the problem of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's is to have nothing that is Caesar's."
    -Thomas Merton
  33. "Don't agonize. Organize."
    -Florynce Kennedy
  34. "I've never been better! In the last act yesterday, I had the audience glued to their seats."
    -(actor)Dustin Farnum
    "How clever of you to think of it."
    -(writer)Oliver Herford
  35. "Young Alexander conquered India.He alone?Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army?Philip of Spain wept as his fleet Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who Triumphed with him?"
    -Bertolt Brecht, "A Worker Reads History"
  36. "When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
    -Goethe
  37. "He who binds to himself a joy
    Doth the winged life destroy
    But he who kisses the joy as it flies
    Lives in Eternitys sun rise"
    -William Blake

    From my Blake Tarot reading for 1999...

  38. "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
    -E. B. White
  39. "They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls."
    -Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) English jurist
    The Reports of Sir Edward Coke (1658) The case of Sutton's Hospital
  40. "We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance."
    -Japanese proverb
  41. "Most American regional accents are not very rich sounding. But don't try to affect the lock-jawed diction of the East Coast aristocracy. This accent is theoretically polite, but George Plimpton is practically the last person alive who has it. There's been a crash program in the Ivy League colleges and the better preparatory schools to eliminate this manner of speaking so that the sons of rich men can run for political office without reminding the voters of Margaret Dumont in old Marx Brothers movies.

    Other accents are even worse. A midwestern nasal twang gives listeners the impression that you have lawn ornaments in your yard. The slurs and ellipses of California speech strike the hearer as the first three danger signals of drug abuse in teen-agers. And a New York accent sounds like somebody buggering a goose with an automobile horn.

    A Texas accent is safe. Texans are all thought to have money. You can acquire a Texas accent by any of the usual means of getting brain damage."
    -P.J. O'Rourke, Modern Manners This is fun since i grew up in the east (near nyc), lived mostly in the midwest and CA. Never lived in Texas.-p

  42. "When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
    -Eugene V. Debs
  43. "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
  44. "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
    -Mao Zedong
  45. "Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our gaze-- I mean the universe--but we cannot understand if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language, & the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without the help of which it is impossible to conceive a single word of it, and without which one wanders in vain through the labyrinth."
    -Galileo Galilei, Opere Il Saggiagore, p. 171
  46. "Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives."
    -Maurice Chevalier
  47. "If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?"
    -Harry Shearer
  48. "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
    -Thomas Edison
  49. "I have immediate access to the internet and e-mail wherever I am. I must be one of the most connected people in the world. My body may be stuck in this chair, but with the internet my mind can go to the ends of the universe."
    -Stephen Hawking
  50. "My teachers could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me."
    -Richard Brautigan
  51. "The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."
    -Abraham Lincoln:
  52. "Exactitude in some small matters is the very soul of discipline"
    -Joseph Conrad

    From Moyra's Web Jewels: the Crystalline set

  53. "Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? "
    -La Rochefoucauld
  54. "The autumn leaves are falling like rain.
    Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
    And you, you are a thousand miles away,
    There are always two cups at my table."
    -T'ang Dynasty poem

    From the Love Blender

  55. "If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us least live so as to deserve it."
    -Immanuel Hermann Fichte
  56. "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
    -Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl, 1952
  57. "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."
    Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942
  58. "The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence."
    -H. L. Mencken
  59. "Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible - not to have run away."
    -Dag Hammarskjold
  60. "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." -M. Cartmill

  61. How about a Quaker threat:

    "Excuse me, friend, but thou standest where I am preparing to shoot".

  62. Looking for the source of this quote. " I have a plan so cunning, you could put a tail on it and call it weasel"
    I am told this i from the BBC series Blackadder

  63. Facilis descensus Averni: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.

    -Virgil: Aeneid, Book 6

    Easy is the descent to Avernus: night & day the gates of black Dis yawn; but to retrace ones steps & escape to the upper air, this is the task, this the labor.

  64. No doubt, the networks are certainly great places to meet men. There are several guys on line for every woman. But, like the outlook for women in Alaska, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

    -Clifford Stoll "Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway", Doubleday

  65. "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
    -Charles de Gaulle

  66. Hell is paved with the skulls of priests.

    -St. John Chrysostom: _De sacerdotio,_ c. 390

  67. Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

    A medley of extemporanea

    And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

    And I am Marie of Roumania.

    -Dorothy Parker

  68. "Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?"

    "It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right?"

    -MacNelley, "Shoe"

  69. The only thing worse than a child drinking . . . is a child drinking alone."

    -W.C. Fields

  70. "In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

    -Al Rogers, Global SchoolHouse Network, speaking at CUE (thanks to Susan H.)

  71. Hope is a state of mind, not of the world... Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons ... Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather and ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

    -Vaclav Havel

Volume I
Volume III
Volume IV

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