Popular quotes page 99
“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer
Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Context: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
“Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist
The Long Loneliness (1952), p. 286
Source: The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.”
Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist
Source: Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating
William Shakespeare Julius Caesar
Variant: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Source: Julius Caesar
“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author
Source: His Last Bow: 8 Stories
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor
My Inventions (1919)
Context: While I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong.
