Quotes about living
page 73

“The most notable difference (of the American character) lies in the psychology of work. In the Orient one works to live; in Europe one works to consume; in America one works to work. These are the three stages of a progressive evolution.”

Corrado Gini (1884–1965) Italian statistician

As quoted in The Work of the Catholic Church in the United States of America (Nardini "Artistic" Publishing Company, 1956), p. 10.

“He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 4
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Peace

“We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs … of our barbarous ancestors.”

Guy De Maupassant book Sur l'eau

Sur l’eau (1888)

“However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

In a letter to his sister, New Year's Day, 1882. Quoted in the Preface
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)

Reading, Personality

“Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other. Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Chapter 1, page 3 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=_7RD2jwMU2wC&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q&f=false

Life, Truth, Faith, Religion

“Lovely Nymphs, ye sister Nymphs of the river Po,
And ye from out the greenwood and where the sea-waves beat,
And ye who live by fountains and on hill-tops high.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Vaghe Ninfe del Po, Ninfe sorelle,
E voi de' boschi e voi d'onda marina
E voi de' fonti e de l'alpestri cime.
Rime d'amore ("Rhymes of Love"), 175.

Love, Sister, Sea

“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 31

Women, Men, Sex, Nature

“Maula Bakhsh, a peasant, lives in Tamil Nadu and speaks Tamil. In Andhra Pradesh he speaks Telugu. In Bengal, his language is Bengali. Do we think of such a Muslim for whom I have invented the name Maula Bakhsh. Jinnah, Khaliquz Zaman, Maulana Azad, the Aga Khan, M. C. Chagla and the Raja of Mehmudabad… were Muslims. So was Hakku, the elderly grandmother of our locality. She prays 5 times a day. She was so deeply moved by one of Gandhi's speeches that she would repeat his name after Allah and His Prophet. At the age of 70, she stitched her own khadi kafan, because she did not want her body to be wrapped and then buried in a foreign cloth. So when people discuss India's Muslims, I wonder who are they talking about. Maula Bakhsh? Jinnah and Co.? Or Hakku?”

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914–1987) Film director, Screenwriter, Novelist, Journalist

'Maula Bakhsh bhi ek Hindustani Mussalman hai', Gagan, in Urdu (Bombay: Mussalman Number, 1975), pp. 96-7 http://web.archive.org/web/20011006030417/http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/010929ij.htm Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence by Mushirul Hasan (1997) C. Hurst & Co. Publishers ISBN 1850653046

People, Age, Thinking, Time

“Microsoft has a long history of taking a principled approach to how we live up to our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more with technology platforms and tools, while also standing up for our enduring values and ethics.”

Satya Nadella (1967) CEO of Microsoft appointed on 4 February 2014

The Verge: "Microsoft CEO plays down ICE contract in internal memo to employees" https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17482500/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-ice-contract-memo (20 June 2018)

History, Personality

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”

Jaroslav Pelikan (1923–2006) US historian of Christianity, Christian theology and medieval intellectual history at Yale

The Vindication of Tradition: 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1984), p. 65.
Alternate version" Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.
in "Christianity as an enfolding circle," U.S. News & World Report (June 26, 1989), p. 57

Faith, Dead

“I live in a world of heartbreak. I just seem to be more creative when in some sort of emotional distress.”

Jack Vettriano (1951) Scottish painter

The Poster Boy of Popular Art ,The Independent, 22 October 2010
On Art

World

“Unless we address those problems from the point of view of a world where development is genuinely sustainable, where protection of the environment is vital, where the earth's wealth is redistributed in favour of the poorest people in the poorest countries, in the next few years we shall face a growing imbalance between north and south. Ever-increasing numbers of people will flee from environmental destruction—from rain forest destruction, increased desertification and the increased flooding linked to that. Millions of people will have to flee from the places where they grew up and live and there will be growing imbalances in the world, and growing poverty. There has to be a change in the relationship. That means that higher prices must be paid for commodities. It means that there must be an increased aid programme, and an understanding that we are all in this together.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/dec/14/overseas-development in the House of Commons (14 December 1990). 1990s

People, World, Understanding, Problem

“A Muslim should live up to his character, and employ his powers in doing what is good, beneficial and helpful.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

Help

“Conformity to the world has in all ages proved the ruin of the church. It is utterly impossible to live in nearness to God, and in friendship with the world.”

Rowland Hill (preacher) (1744–1833) British preacher

P. 621.

God, Friendship, Age, World

“In my first year of marriage I have often wept and the tears fall often as they did in my childhood - in large drops. They occur when I hear music and when I see beautiful things which move me. In the last analysis, I live alone just as much as I did in my childhood. This aloneness makes me sometimes sad and sometimes happy. I believe it deepens one's life. One lives less according to outward appearances... One lives inwardly.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

note from her Journal, March 1902; as quoted by Susan P. Bachrach, in 'Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Woman and Artist as Revealed Through Her Depiction of Children', (text on: Fembio - Notable Woman International: Biographies http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography_extra/paula-modersohn-becker/) 1900 - 1905

Life, Marriage, Happiness, Sadness

“And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and all the philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

People, Books, Soul

“As we have seen, the explicit part of the circular issued by the West Bengal government in 1989 in effect was that there must be no negative reference to Islamic rule in India. Although these were the very things which contemporary Islamic writers had celebrated, there must be no reference to the destruction of the temples by Muslim rulers, to the forcible conversion of Hindus, to the numerous other disabilities which were placed on the Hindu population. Along with the circular, the passages which had to be removed were listed and substitute passages were specified. The passages which were ordered to be deleted contained, if anything, a gross understatement of the facts. On the other hand, passages which were sought to be inserted contained total falsehoods: that by paying jizyah Hindus could lead ‘normal lives’ under an Islamic ruler like Alauddin Khalji! A closer study of the textbooks which are today being used under the authority of the West Bengal government shows a much more comprehensive, a much deeper design than that of merely erasing the cruelties of Islamic rule.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Study, Parting

“Libya lived for 5000 years without oil and it is ready to live another 5000 years without it.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Quote from oil fields nationalisation speech.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12688033

“We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Children’s Song"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

World

“Happiness and success come from living in the present, not from existing in the past.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 131

Happiness, Success, Past

“Those may justly be reckoned void of understanding that do not bless and praise God; nor do men ever rightly use their reason till they begin to be religious, nor live as men till they live to the glory of God. As reason is the substratum or subject of religion (so that creatures which have no reason are not capable of religion), so religion is the crown and glory of reason, and we have our reason in vain, and shall one day wish we had never had it, if we do not glorify God with it.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Daniel 4:34-37.
Commentaries

Men, God, Religion, Understanding

“He came in tongues of living flame”

Harriet Auber (1773–1862) British poet, hymnwriter

Our Blest Redeemer, ere He breathed (Baptist Hymn Book, Psalms and Hymns Trust, London, 1962)

“Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1936)

Justice, Heart, Indifference

“I don't think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we're someone else. I don't tell tall tales. I always tell the truth.”

Albert Finney (1936–2019) English actor

Reply when asked if he thought he was a lot like the character he plays in Big Fish in an interview with Paul Fischer at Dark Horizons (2 December 2003).

Truth, Lie, Thinking

“I will take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of country should we have? A strong country, or a worthy one where people can live decently? We chose the former – a strong country. Once again we are living in an era of power. Russians are fighting Ukrainians. Their brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother, Ukrainian. That's the way it is for many people. Russian planes are bombing Syria … A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand … Sometimes I am not sure that I've finished writing the history of the "Red" man.”

Svetlana Alexievich (1948) Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer

Nobel Lecture (2015)

People, Fear, Hope, Way

“Most of today's youth seem to almost instinctively realize that they are living on borrowed time. After all, we are the first generation that has had to live with the knowledge that we could completely destroy ourselves. People want to know what to do about it, or if there is any way to avoid it or prepare for it, to survive it.”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

A More Sure Word of Prophecy (2 Peter 1:19)

People, Youth, Way, Knowledge

“You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

The Report newsmagazine, January 22, 2001.
2001

People

“I know the American people understand the stakes in Iraq. They want to win. They will support the war as long as they see a path to victory. Americans can have confidence that we will prevail because thousands of smart, dedicated military and civilian personnel are risking their lives and are working around the clock to ensure our success.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Press Conference http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061025.html (October 25, 2006) 2000s, 2006

War, People, Confidence, Understanding

“We know ourselves what difficult times we live in. We know equally, and we are conscious of the fact, that with us—all of us at home and overseas—there rests the responsibility whether this form of government will remain, or whether it will fail. It is therefore good that we who meet from all corners of the world to take counsel with one another, should, at any rate among ourselves, hold this torch of freedom alight, and alive, until other nations come to see our ways.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association's Conference in Westminster Hall (4 July 1935); published in This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (1935), pp. 5-6.
1935

World, Way, Home, Freedom

“No longer shall the intrigues and mischief-making of the imperialists deceive us. No longer shall our work be interrupted under flimsy pretexts. We are working to attain a bright and better future, ensuring freedom and prosperous living not only to ourselves but to posterity.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered in the gardens of the Shaab Hall (May 1, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

Freedom, Future

“Most American officials viewed Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as the Bosnia leader with the broadest vision - an eloquent advocate of a multiethnic state. But his power struggles with Izetbegović and Sacirbey and other members of the Bosnian government often isolated him. His collegues complained that he was difficult to work with. He carried a serious additional burden: Tuđman and Milošević distrusted him. Nevertheless, Silajzic was one of the two msot popular Muslim politicians in Bosnia, along with Izetbegović. My own feelings about Silajdzic shifted frequently. There was something touching about his intensity and energy, and his constant desire to improve himself intellectually. Although always busy, he seemed alone - his wife and son lived in Turkey. Silajdzic was the only Bosnian official who seemed genuinely to care about economic reconstruction of his ravaged land. His unpredictable moods worried us, but his support would be essential for any peace agreement.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 188

Peace, Feeling, Mood, Business

“I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people’s lives.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2010s, (July 26, 2016)

People, Age, Change

“To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort⎯⎯⎯to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep⎯⎯⎯that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life⎯⎯⎯our immortality.”

D.H. Lawrence book Sons and Lovers

Source: Sons and Lovers (1913), Ch.11

Life, Beauty, Thinking, Effort

“If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line of death.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

"Base Details"
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

Death, Speed

“What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck book Philosophie Zoologique

Ce que la nature fait avec beaucoup de temps, nous le faisons tous les jours, en changeant nous-mêmes subitement, par rapport à un végétal vivant, les circonstances dans lesquelles lui et tous les individus de son espèce se rencontroient.
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), p. 226; translation by Hugh Elliot, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals (1914), p. 109.

Nature, Change

“The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 3

“I declare I hold [physicians] to be true heroes, when I regard their hard existence, their pure pathetic lives; when I recall their cheerfulness and manliness; when I see them, generously forgetful of self, answering every call with alacrity; when I think of the warm heart that beats so steadfastly under the fuzzy damp coat; when I know that the lantern that guides them in a dark night to the house of distress is but like their own calm purpose and resolve shining forth to guide and comfort others.”

Jacob Mendes Da Costa (1833–1900) American physician

[citation needed]

Thinking, Heart, Housing, Night

“Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 2, The Disjunction of Cultural Discourse, p. 95

People

“Oh, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

In circa A.D. 375. Included in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (NPNF), edited by P. Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburg: T. Clark, 1897), 2nd Series, Vol. 8. Quoted in Matthew Scully, [//books.google.it/books?id=SYY7AAAAQBAJ&pg=PT28 Dominion] (2002).

God, Exercises, Sense, Past

“They said get back honky cat,
Better get back to the woods.
Well I quit those days and my redneck ways.
And oh the change is gonna do me good.You better get back honky cat,
Living in the city ain't where it's at.
It's like trying to find gold in a silver mine.
It's like trying to drink whiskey from a bottle of wine.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Honky Cat
Song lyrics, Honky Château (1972)

Way, Cats, Drink, Wine

“We don't need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to re-read the Constitution and enforce the Constitution. We don't need to re-write, let's reread! And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that. So for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there's a little section in there that talks about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believed in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," don't stop right there, keep reading. 'Cause that's when it says "when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

We've got some altering and some abolishing to do!
Lecturing Americans To ‘Reread’ Constitution, Herman Cain Confuses It With Declaration of Independence
Think Progress
Ian
Millhiser
2011-05-23
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/23/168628/cain-reread-constitution/
2011-10-08
Quoting parts of the United States Declaration of Independence: “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 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....”

Life, Happiness, People, Parent

“Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

It's the Demography, Stupid (2006)

People, World

“A [further] aspect [of homosexuality] is the hatred of God’s reality, an insistence on wars against reality, in living in a world of make believe. As a result, the theater is the natural element of these people. Some scholars, again not Christian, have pointed out there has been by-and-large a strong homosexual control of the theater, in varying degrees in different times, from the days of the Romans. But part and parcel of this homosexual control of the theater has been the delight in prostituting women, in using them and abusing them for the sheer delight of showing their contempt for them. Now this is homosexual culture, described by people who are not hostile to it, and in fact sometimes have some good things to say for it.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

Women, God, Hostility, War

“There were the vast numbers of ordinary Africans, who, animated by a lively national consciousness, sought knowledge as an instrument of national emancipation and integrity. This is not to say that these Africans overlooked the purely cultural value of their studies. But in order that their cultural acquisition should be valuable, they needed to be capable of appreciating it as free men.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, p. 4.

Men, Knowledge, Study, Animals

“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

Youth, Fight

“Everyone who feels "I love" adds to the heavenly glow. The love that has been felt all through the ages, everywhere, all through time… what a shining! What an eternal process and presence! Love is the source, love the goal, and love the method of attainment. A network of love crisscrosses the globe. The delicate shining lines form a tenuous web from one end of the world to the other. There are so many threads of love in the world, so much love going on, for and from so many people. To have partaken of and to have given love is the greatest of life's rewards. There seems never an end to the loving that goes on forever and ever. Loving and leaving are a part of living.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992), pp. 193-194

Love, Life, People, Age

“At that time my heart was all broke
I looked like ashes and smelled like smoke.
And I turned away from my loving kind
Try to leave my body and live in my mind.
But it's much too much emotion
To hold it in your hand.
They've got waves out on the ocean
They're gonna wear away the land.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Line 'Em Up"
Song lyrics, Hourglass (1997)

Love, Time, Heart

“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 5, sect. 2

Communication, Failure

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Hate, War, World, Home

“They darted down and rose up like a wave
Or buzzed impetuously as before;
One would have thought the corpse was held a slave
To living by the life it bore!”

Allen Tate (1899–1979) American poet, essayist and social commentator

A Carrion, from Poems (1961).

Life

“Long live the Cuban revolution! Long live Comrade Fidel Castro!”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Speech at a Rally in Cuba (1991)

“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

Walker Percy book The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

Books, Reading

“Bloodlessness and pain dried within; and blowing of wind and cold coming from without met together in the sweet body of Christ. And these four, — twain without, and twain within — dried the flesh of Christ by process of time. And though this pain was bitter and sharp, it was full long lasting, as to my sight, and painfully dried up all the lively spirits of Christ’s flesh. Thus I saw the sweet flesh dry in seeming by part after part, with marvellous pains. And as long as any spirit had life in Christ’s flesh, so long suffered He pain.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 16

Life, Pain, Suffering, Time

“Ridicule parts social life like an invisible paling; and we are all of us afraid of the other. To this may be in great measure attributed the difference that exists between an author's writings and his conversation. The one is often sad and thoughtful, while the other is lively and careless. The fact is, that the real character is shown in the first instance, and the assumed in the second.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life, Sadness, Parting

“We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion-for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate-have a power that lives after us. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies. These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others, others who may be condemned as agents of Satan. Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.”

Chris Hedges book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

Source: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chapter One: Faith, p. 11

Love, Hate

“As long as I live, so long do I learn.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 1036

Learning

“Although all human beings experience desires, all are not controlled by them. Those who are not controlled by desire maintain balance in their lives and can thereby attain higher levels of understanding.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

The Warrior is Silent

Understanding

“Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 36

Fear, Art, Effort, Personality

“This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 7, Mesopotamian Civilization, p. 213

People, Study, Wealth

“I had always aimed to bridge the gap between humans and wolves but being able to speak for the wolf is pointless unless you can communicate with the people who need to hear you. What Helen couldn't cope with was my inability to give myself completely. Of the two worlds I lived in, one was devoid of emotion, the other was full of it. I knew I turned my emotions off when I was in the wolf world but I had always thought I turned them back on when I walked up the track to the caravan. I never did; I never truly left the forest.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

I howled for the woman I loved... and she howled back - British wolfman tells how his obsession drove away the love of his life http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1245507/I-howled-woman-I-loved--howled--British-wolfman-tells-obsession-drove-away-love-life.html, Daily Mail, (23 January, 2010)

People, World, Communication, Wolf

“.. when I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the "o" in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play... I do not remember my friend's house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

9 September 1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My life', pp. 66-67

Truth, Age, Travel, Dance

“You're the one who's nearly
Breaking my heart;
Had your chance
You just threw it all away.
Living in a world that
You could never be a part of,
And now is a time to walk away.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Tubular Bells III (1998)

World, Chance, Time, Heart

“It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

Money, World, Flowers, Passion

“There is a distinction and differentiation,
According to our reason,
Between God and the Godhead,
Between action and rest.
The fruitful nature of the Persons (Trinity)
Ever worketh in a living differentiation.
But the simple Being of God,
According to the nature thereof,
Is an eternal Rest of God
And of all created things”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Twelve Beguines

God, Nature, Personality

“To live in perpetual employment, is to travel rapidly through life. Tranquility lengthens our existence.”

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) writer from France

Source: An Essay on Old Age, 1732, p. 136

Life, Travel

“Genuine living and mere vegetating have only breathing in common (and a few other things).”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

“Now if you see that it is inconceivable that anything should exist, it is evident that at least one inconceivable fact is there. That is to say, that which exists is not limited to the conceivable. Since the inconceivable is there, it is impossible to set any limit to the quantity of inconceivableness which may be present in the situation. Now were the existence of anything consistently to remind you of the fact of inconceivability, since it is impossible to live without interacting with a large number of existing things, it would be impossible for you to feel in the same way about the conceivable.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

Way, Feeling

“Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams
Here lives an idle man
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff
Swiftly springs and autumns pass
But my mind is at peace, clear and free
By now I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Peace, Home, Mountain, Spring

“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation. We hire people who are freaks. They don’t have social lives. They’re junkies about news and information.”

Steve Bannon (1953) American media executive and former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump

How Breitbart has become a dominant voice in conservative media by Paul Farhi. The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-breitbart-has-become-a-dominant-voice-in-conservative-media/2016/01/27/a705cb88-befe-11e5-9443-7074c3645405_story.html?utm_term=.8b7cb6a8a84c (January 27, 2017)

People, Thinking, Fight

“She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 13. Mildred is the daughter of Elliot and Bernice Pritchard.

Life, Secret, Dreams, Way

“If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.”

Clement Freud (1924–2009) English broadcaster, writer, politician and chef

The Observer (1964-12-27)
Misattributed to George Bernard Shaw on The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 14: The War At Home. Fictional President Bartlett, smoking a cigarette, spoke the second half of the quote and attributed it to Shaw. His chief of staff disputed whether it was Shaw, and the President concurred.

Love, Drink

“The point I am trying to make clear is the fact that if we are to see a resurgence of life and power in our beloved Society we must open the way for vital, kindling, inspiring persons to visit, or better still to live in, the communities where there are, or ought to be, meetings.”

Rufus M. Jones (1863–1948) American writer

What Will Get Us Ready (1944)

Life, Way, Communication, Personality

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 191)

Thinking, Reality

“A republic worth living in is worth fighting for, and sacrificing for, and dying for. In the fires of this conflict we shall wipe out the disloyalty of those who wear American garb without the faith, and establish a new concord of citizenship and a new devotion, so that we should have made a safe America the home and hope of a people who are truly American in heart and soul.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1910s, The Republic Must Awaken (1917)

People, Faith, Hope, Home

“The question concerns the texture of daily life. Does the individual live with the assurance, conscious or unconscious, that We are absolute—or with the challenge of being, both as I and as We, finite and human?”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 38

Life, Question

“A sharp contrast existed between the upper classes who constantly moved from manor to manor and the peasants who were tied to the land and lived in agricultural villages outside the castle walls. Yet economic opportunities expanded for both groups.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 3 : The Castle as Headquarters : The Political and Economic Role of the Castle

“Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory and anticipation.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 312 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=354 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Memory, Past, Future, Animals

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

America Can Be Saved! (1979) Sword of the Lord Publishers, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, p. 52-53, quoted at "The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party" http://www.theocracywatch.org/schools2.htm

Happiness, School, Hope, Country

“To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing on the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1970s, Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

Life, Way, Nature, Help

“Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers.”

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) politician and journalist during the French Revolution

L'Ami du peuple, vol. 2, p. 1121

Happiness, Falseness

“A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

The Salvaging of Civilization (1921)

Men, War, Time

“Through this sight of the blessed Passion, with the Godhead that I saw in mine understanding, I knew well that It was strength enough for me, yea, and for all creatures living, against all the fiends of hell and ghostly temptation.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The First Revelation, Chapter 4

Hell, Understanding, Passion

“Not too many people work in a job where, waiting out there are three or four hundred people who are paid to tear apart what you've done. And often they are brighter than you are, or they know more about the subject than you do, or they wish they had written a book themselves, or done a lot better. Or they just don't like it! And you have to live with it. I have been very well treated by the critics in the long haul.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

People, Books, Tear, Waiting

“I have seen a man in London, who I believe is now living, ring twelve bells at one time; two of them were placed upon his head, he held two in each hand, one was affixed to each of his knees, and two upon each foot; all of which he managed with great adroitness, and performed a vast variety of tunes.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 293
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Bell ringing

Time

“Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men's private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Lysander, sec. 17
Parallel Lives

Men, Way

“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Truth, Hope, Thinking, Change

“Among the grievances of modern days, much complained of, but with little hope of redress, is the matter of receiving and paying visits, the number of which, it is generally agreed, “has been increasing, is increased, and ought to be diminished.”… Nor is this complaint by any means peculiar to the times in which we have the honour to live. Cowley was out of all patience on the subject above a hundred years ago. “If we engage,” says he, “in a large acquaintance, and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to a ‘quotidian ague of frigid impertinencies,’ which would make a wise man tremble to think of.””

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Life, Hope, Thinking, Time

“While one welcomes aid that gets through to help the poorest people in the poorest parts of the world, does my hon. Friend share my concern that some policies, particularly those adopted by the World Bank in its advice to poor countries in receipt of loans it organises, force on those countries economic models that often involve cuts in public expenditure which make the living conditions of people dependent on public services, health, education or housing worse because those countries are pursuing some economic Valhalla similar to that pursued by the present Government? Does he believe that the Government should consider their role in multinational agencies such as the World Bank as well as my hon. Friend's obvious and quite correct concern about the lack of spending on overseas aid in general?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/jul/28/overseas-aid-and-development in the House of Commons (28 July 1988). 1980s

People, Health, World, Education

“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The Intelligent Woman's Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism, New York: NY, Brentano (1928) p. 670.
1920s

Clothes

“Athena's great problem was that she was a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first, and making no secret of the fact, either. Did she pay a price? She certainly did. But she would have paid a still higher price if she had repressed her natural exuberance. She would have been bitter, frustrated, always concerned about "what other people might think," always saying, "I'll just sort these things out, then I'll devote myself to my dream," always complaining "that the conditions are never quite right."”

Paulo Coelho book The Witch of Portobello

Deidre O'Neill, known as Edda, p. 11.
The Witch of Portobello (2007)

People, Secret, Dreams, Nature

“He (Babaji) is not preaching any new religion. He has come to preach the religion, which occurred at the time of Creation, and that is the Sanatan Dharma - the Eternal Religion. He has come to preach the Sanatan Dharma only. We can determine the date from which every religion started. For example, the Muslim religion was started by Mohammed 1400 years ago and this is recorded in their scriptures. Christianity started with birth of Christ, 2000 years ago. Before Christ and Mohammed existed, the world and its people were living. The Sanatan Dharma has been followed for thousands and millions of years and no one is able to trace the date it began. You may try to understand this spontaneous religion this way: the dharma (law or nature) of fire is to burn; the dharma of water is to be wet; the air has to blow. Can one tell on what day the fire started to burn, the water to be wet, and the air to blow? No one can say. Sanatan Dharma is like a great ocean. From that ocean, each country has dug canals according to their needs and purposes. But canals cannot give total satisfaction as the ocean gives complete bliss. The Lord is showing a vision of the Sanatan Dharma, which is like the great ocean, and this is the greatest form of knowledge. Until now, people only had knowledge of their canals. Now the Lord is showing us that we aren't just bubbles in a canal, but rather bubbles in the great ocean. As long as we have individuality, we are seen as bubbles; when we disappear, we are one with the ocean. (Vishnu Dutt Shastriji about Haidakhan Babaji and Sanatan Dharma)”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

25 March 1983
The Teachings of Babaji

People, World, Religion, Law

“Living life in "emergency scan" mode self-perpetuates instead of self-corrects. Deal w/a non-emergency before it is one.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

4 November 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/318242203639809 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Life

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money, People, Sadness, Angels

“The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Family

“I think living well is the key: trying not to build up regrets for the things we didn't do in our lives; to try to live a regret-free life in which we feel satisfied in what we're doing; and to try to be kind to ourselves and not disappointed in ourselves.”

Irvin D. Yalom (1931) American psychotherapist and writer

The grand old man of American psychiatry on what he has learnt about life (and death) in his still-flourishing career, The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/irvin-d-yalom-interview-the-grand-old-man-of-american-psychiatry-on-what-he-has-learnt-about-life-10134092.html

Life, Disappointment, Feeling, Thinking

“Now I understand for Mr Downer and other members of the chattering classes in the Liberal Party: they might think what qualifies you to know about national security, is you sit in a minister's office typing press releases all of your lives, with the greatest risk to your personal safety being a papercut – Mr Downer might think that's appropriate; well I do not.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Response to criticism by former Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer "Julia Gillard slams Downer over security" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW4NtYIu2XE, in ABC News, 30 July 2010

Understanding, Thinking, Personality