“Every man has a long list of things that should be done, but which he knows can't be done. Yet he continues to talk about them as long as he lives.”

E.W. Howe's Monthly January 1912.

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E. W. Howe35

Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor 1853–1937

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Alfred Einstein', p. 184
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“There's this man who lives in the sky, and he has ten things he doesn't want you to do, and you'll burn for a long time if you do them. But he loves you.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”
Sapiens vivit quantum debet, non quantum potest.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXX: On the proper time to slip the cable, Line 4.

“The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him -- because the mails talk about him -- even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

[Re: Real men don't attack straw men, MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119761726816776, 2007-12-14, 2017-04-20]

“Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Systematic Theology (1951–63)
Context: Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing. Man is totally concerned about the totality which is his true being and which is disrupted in time and space. Man is unconditionally concerned about that which conditions his being beyond all the conditions in him and around him. Man is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents.

“My offensive player of the year is going to be Javon Ringer for the way he has carried his team and the workhorse load that he’s carried all year long. Everyone knows he’s getting the football yet he continues to produce.”

Javon Ringer (1987) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back

Charles Davis of the Big Ten Network, quoted at Ringer 23.com (undated)

“The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.”

Robert Penn Warren book All the King's Men

All the King's Men (1946)

“Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

B 12
Variant translation: Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.
As quoted in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] (1905) by Sigmund Freud, as translated by James Strachey (1960), p. 100
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

“No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX

“Hold back your mind from pride, for pride comes only from ignorance. The man who does not know thinks that he is great, that he has done this or that great thing; the wise man knows that only God is great, that all good work is done by God alone.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

§ III
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)

“Every man has a long list of things that should be done, but which he knows can't be done. Yet he continues to talk about them as long as he lives.”

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E. W. Howe35

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