Quotable Quotes

Victor Sohmen

Here are some memorable quotes for you to read, enjoy and ponder!

Flowers!

Lives there a man with soul so bare,
Who never to himself has said:
This is my own, my native land.

Sir Walter Scott

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Certainly, nothing that I had seen or experienced before in America matched this first sight of the Grand Canyon. I felt that God had set it there as a sign. Of what, I didn't know: I made no intellectual response to this challenge.

But as I peered over the far edge of all familiar things, and I saw the storm clouds roll and flash in the gulf below, the rainbows tangled in the hanging woods, the sunlight turning the mist to drifting smoke and the vast shadowy walls into ruined empires, I kept muttering to myself that it had been set there as a sign. I felt wonder and awe, but at the heart of them a deep rich happiness.

I had seen His handiwork, and I rejoiced.

J.B.Priestley

We shall fight in France; we shall fight on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and strength in the air; we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on landing grounds; we shall fight in fields, in streets and in hills. We shall never surrender and even if--which I do not for a moment believe--this island or a large part of it was subjected and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until God's good time, a new world with all its power and might steps forth to the liberation and rescue of the old.

Winston Churchill

We now have an unprecedented power of production side by side with unprecedented shortages. We have invented machines to work for us, but have less spare labour than ever before for human service--even for such an essential and elementary service as helping mothers to look after their babies. We have persistent alternations of widespread unemployment with famines of manpower. Undoubtedly, the contrast between our expanding historical horizon and our contracting historical vision is something characteristic of our age. Yet, looked at in itself, what an astonishing contradiction it is!

Arnold B. Toynbee

A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends upon the labors of other men, living and dead, and I must exert myself in order to live, in the same measure as I have received, and am receiving.

Albert Einstein

No institution inspired by fear can furthur life. Hope, not fear, is the creative principle in human affairs.

All that has made man great has sprung from the attempt to secure what is good, not from the struggle to avert what was thought evil.

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves a great result....Education should not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts, but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create. It should be inspired, not by a regretful hankering after the extinct beauties of Greece and the Renaissance, but by a shining vision of the society that is to be, of the triumphs that thought will achieve in the time to come, and the overwhelming horizon of man's survey over the universe.

Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled with life and hope and joy, able to bear their part in bringing to mankind a future less somber than the past, with faith in the glory that human effort can create.

Bertrand Russell

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...

Thomas Jefferson & Co.

So far as our knowledge goes, human mind and personality are unique and constitute the highest product yet achieved by the cosmos. Let us not put off our responsibilities on to the shoulders of mythical gods or philospophical absolutes, but shoulder them in the hopefulness of tempered pride.

In the perspective of biology, our business in the world is seen to be the imposition of the best and most enduring of our human standards upon ourselves and our planet.

The enjoyment of beauty and interest, the achievement of goodness and efficiency, the enhancement of life and its variety--these are the harvest which our human uniqueness should be called upon to yield.

Julian Huxley

The art of prose is employed in discourse; its substance is by nature significative; that is, the words are first of all not objects but designations for objects; it is not first of all a manner of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves, but whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that someone has taught us by means of words without being able to recall a single one of the words which have trasmitted it to us.

Jean-Paul Sartre

We may take as the essential element in civilization the ethical perfecting of the individual and of society as well. But at the same time, every spiritual and every material step in advance has a significance for civilization. The will to civilization is then the universal will to progress which is conscious of the ethical as the highest value for all.

In spite of the greatest importance we attach to the triumphs of knowledge and achievement, it is nevertheless obvious that only a humanity which is striving after ethical ends can in full measure share in the blessings brought by material progress and become master of the dangers which accompany it. To the generation which has adopted a belief in an immanent power of progress realizing itself, in some measure, naturally and automatically, and which thought that it no longer needed any ethical ideals but could advance to its goal by means of knowledge and achievement alone, terrible proof was being given by its present position of the error into which it had sunk.

Albert Schweitzer

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana

No human being whose spirit is healthy likes destruction of any kind. A part of creation, he sides instinctively with the creative forces of the world.

If this be true of men, how could it not be true of women? Biologically they are the true modellers of the human race. Sociologically they are the promoters, and in many ways the creators, of all the values of collective life--cleanliness, order, comfort, security, beauty, good manners--all the values which raise human communities above the pig-sty, the bee-hive, the cave. Women impersonate the creative spirit in a particularly felicitous way. Less systematic than men, they are more persevering; less logical, they are more consistent; less busy, they are more active; less ambitious, they are more powerful; less scheming, they are more purposeful; less informed, they are more knowing; less sure of themselves, they are more sure of the world. Women are the favourite instruments of the Great Design.

Salvador De Madariaga

The falling snow concealed the sky in a dense, gracious blanket. The yard, the fields, the town lurking like a beast in the darkness, were wrapped in drowsy slumber.

Mikhail Sholokhov

In the world of nature the warring instinct and the instinct to live are different aspects of the same thing. Those primeval biological instincts go deeper than any temporary ideologies or political creeds. In the biological world merciless wars have always existed side by side with the most persistent displays of love for the young and all those manifestations of courtship which produce beauty and which we know as the charm and fragrance of the flower, the caroling of the lark, and the song of the cricket.

Lin Yutang

The civilization of a race is simply the sum-total of its achievements in adjusting itself to its environment. Success or failure in that adjustment depends upon the ability of the race to use intelligence for the invention of necessary and effective tools. Advancement in civilization depends upon the improvement of tools. Such terms as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Steam and Electricity Age tell the tale of the development of civilization. And what is true of the historical development of civilization, is no less true of the geographical distribution of the different civilizations.

Hu Shih

What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavour
Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever?

Euripides

How amazing is this spirit of man!

In spite of innumerable failings, man, throughout the ages, has sacrificed his life and all he held dear for an ideal, for truth, for faith, for country and honour. That ideal may change, but that capacity for self-sacrifice continues, and because of that, much may be forgiven to man, and it is impossible to lose hope for him.

In the midst of disaster he has not lost his dignity or his faith in the values he cherished. Plaything of nature's mighty forces, less than the speck of dust in this vast universe, he has hurled defiance at the elemental powers, and with his mind, sought to master them. Whatever gods there be, there is something godlike in man, as there is also something of the devil in him.

Jawaharlal Nehru

A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. It is only the full emergence of the soul; the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit; and the consequent transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental nature by a spiritual and supramental supernature--that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

Sri Aurobindo

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation--or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated--can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract.

The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what THEY did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here, to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
(Gettysburg Address)

More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

Alfred Tennyson

Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered).

Julius Ceaser

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable. Nothing but the truth shall be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about (the president) than about anyone else.

Theodore Roosevelt

What exactly is one's reaction to a great work of art? What does one feel when for instance one looks at Titian's Entombment in the Louvre or listens to the quintet in the Meinstersinger? I know what mine is. It is an excitement that gives me a sense of exhileration, intellectual but suffused with sensuality, a feeling of well-being in which I seem to discern a sense of power and of liberation from human ties; at the same time I feel in myself a tenderness which is rich with human sympathy; I feel rested, at peace and yet spiritually aloof....Of course it is delightful--and pleasure in itself is good, but what is there in it that makes it superior to any other pleasure, so superior that to speak of it as pleasure at all means to depreciate it?....The rapture was worthless unless it strengthened the character and rendered man more capable of right action. The value of it lay in works.

W. Somerset Maugham

The woods are lovely, dark and deep;
But I have promises to keep...
And miles to go before I sleep...
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Optimism is the noble temptation to see too much in everything.

G.K. Chesterton