Quotes about living (10000 quotes, page 96)

“If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God” merely because it was always there.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 108
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

God

“The poetical character… is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.”

John Keats Letter to Richard Woodhouse

Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

Light

“What do you want — a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

"Gauley Bridge"
U.S. 1 (1938), The Book of the Dead

People , Sea

“Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 389
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Drink , Future , Dead

“My mother, whom I loved very much, had trouble with me. I had very good school certificates. But I tormented her with horribly stinky collections. It was not enough for me at home to have a dog, a cat, a canary, a fish, and even a white mouse, which loved to walk around the apartment, although it lived in a cage. I added the protozoa to this menagerie. Traditional definitions regarded these small organisms – such as, for example, amoebae, flagellates, sponges, algae – as single-celled. What in these asexually reproducing animals or plants could intrigue the little boy so much that he permanently endured this abomination (as the mother would say) home?! After all, neither the request nor the threat of this exceptionally tolerant woman, who carried out her home diligently on a daily basis, did not help. A trip to the ponds, or actually to the stagnant at Bonarka – where today is Mateczny Roundabout – were exciting for the little boy. And even more he enjoyed moments when he could watch for hours what was happening in aquariums, jars or cages.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Bętkowska, Teresa (August–September 2010). "Mistrz niszowej dyscypliny" http://www2.almamater.uj.edu.pl/126/17.pdf (PDF). Alma Mater (in Polish). Kraków: Jagiellonian University (126–127): pp. 41–46.

Love , School , Dogs , Home

“The fact is, people work hard and rely on Food Stamps—or SNAP Program—to be able to feed their families. When they work full-time they still live in poverty. That's wrong in our nation. Students who are losing hope because of the difficulty of finding jobs in this tough economy. What we need to do, what is best for America, is to raise wages, create jobs, and then we will move forward. Hard-working people are trying their best, but those who hold on to capital are not sharing the wealth, and there is the problem.”

Simone Campbell (1945) American Roman Catholic Religious Sister and activist

Simone Campbell, interviewed by Al Sharpton, " Nun Responds To Hannity's 'Communist' Comparison: 'Name Calling Is About All That Exists On That Side' http://www.mediamatters.org/video/2014/04/21/nun-responds-to-hannitys-communist-comparison-n/198961," Media Matters for America video, 4:12, April 21, 2014.

People , Family , Food , Hope

“Several days later, I tell a neighbor, a man I know well, that my mother died and that the floor lamp in my bedroom came on during the night. My neighbor is sincerely sorry to hear of my mother’s death; he supposes there must have been some kind of surge in the electrical grid. Our lives are so similar, my friends’ and mine. The difference between us briefly flares—like the lamp in my bedroom—only when I publish a religious opinion.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death , Sincerity , Night

“On Friday, April 27th, he took a walk in the afternoon. That night he fell violently ill. He remained conscious and when informed by the doctor that he could ‘live only a few days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’ Before losing consciousness he said to Mrs. Bevan (who was with him throughout the night) ‘Tell them I've had a wonderful life!’ By ‘them’ he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been ‘wonderful’! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Love , Life , Way , Thinking

“Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents' activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

“Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.”

Jean Giraudoux The Trojan War Will Not Take Place

Tiger at the Gates (1935)

Country

“When Piedmont died, I had to pay him back for my life. I found out there's another debt to pay — for the privilege of being alive. I thought Sophie was my reward for trying to live a good life. Uh uh. There is no payoff — not now.”

Bill Murray (1950) American actor and comedian

The Razor's Edge (1984)

Life

“26. And [the Messiah] said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"27. "Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"28. "No matter what those tortures, no matter how difficult the task?"29. "Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.30. "And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.' What would you do then?"31. And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

God , Pleasure , World , Hell

“If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.”

William McDonough (1951) American architect

"William McDonough: Godfather of Green", WNYC Studio 360 (18 March 2008) http://www.studio360.org/2011/apr/22/william-mcdonough-godfather-green/

Nature , Thinking

“The global reach of Smith's moral and political reasoning is quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all human beings are born with similar potential and, most importantly for policymaking, that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities.
There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith's ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of his mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town. Smith's analyses and explorations are of critical importance for any society in the world in which issues of morals, politics and economics receive attention. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Amartya Sen, " The economist manifesto http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/04/smith-market-essay-sentiments", New Statesman (23 April 2010)
2010s

Life , World , Idea , Nature

“Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Winokur, Jon. The Portable Curmudgeon, p. 174. http://books.google.com/books?id=V0DUAXBkf_0C Plume, 1992. ISBN 0452266688
Attributed

People , Angels

“There is a lot of talk amongst Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the United Nations. Why should the other countries of this world, countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to clean up our mess? I oppose the U. N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe — just maybe — God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

[Heads Up... from Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com, 14 April 2004, http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/heads-up-from-michael-moore]
2004

God , War , Children , People

“Even while acknowledging that Washington is broken and that Americans have lost faith and trust in government, all President Obama could offer was more interference and government mandates as solutions to the problems government itself has created. His latest gem: “smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior.” Government is not just broken. It is running out of control, destroying our lives, our liberty, our security and our livelihood.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The State of the Union is Still a State of War http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7189"

Faith , Behavior , Problem

“Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Change , Time

“She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend. 'I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend were were in Canada' 'That's how dumb we were,' I say. 'You could be sisters,' the nurse says. So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glorious place? But do they ask? They do not ask. Two months, and how long is the drive? The best I can explain it is this - I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the gritiest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the bone - and when he looked at it - it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it - and hoping that I will live through it.”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

Reasons to Live (1985)

Death , Hope , Cars , Drink

“Cinema is dead. I can give you a date - it died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced to the livings rooms of the world. Bang! That's the end.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

NoTV Interview with Peter Greenaway on VJ-ing http://www.petergreenaway.info/content/view/125/68/
Interviews

World , Dead

“What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“If I were a young man
With my bones full of marrow,
Oh, if I were a bold young man
Straight as an arrow,
I'd store up no virtue
For Heaven's distant plain,
I'd live at ease as I did please
And sin once again.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

Distant

“I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy… Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich's surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Response to a letter from an unemployed professional musician (5 April 1933), p. 115
The editors precede this passage thus, "Early in 1933, Einstein received a letter from a professional musician who presumably lived in Munich. The musician was evidently troubled and despondent, and out of a job, yet at the same time, he must have been something of a kindred spirit. His letter is lost, all that survives being Einstein's reply....Note the careful anonymity of the first sentence — the recipient would be safer that way:" Albert Einstein: The Human Side concludes with this passage, followed by the original passages in German.
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Beauty , Nature , Thinking , Time

“By no means run in debt: take thine own measure.
Who cannot live on twenty pound a year,
Cannot on forty.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

The Temple (1633), The Church Porch

“The biblical understanding of the human person is holistic. It makes no distinction between body and soul. The human person is not a soul living in a body, but an animated body, so perfectly integrated that the person in his totality can express himself/herself and be apprehended in any part. “It is the body rooted in the cosmos and related to other human beings, which gives the person his or her identity.””

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2006) Life in Abundance: Indian Christian Reflections on Spirituality. Mumbai: St Pauls
On Spirituality

Soul , Understanding , Animals , Parting

“…There are three groups in Hindustan which are known for the qualities of fanaticism and zeal. So long as these three are not exterminated, no king can feel secure, nor any noble. The people (read Muslims) also will not be able to live in peace.
Religious as well as worldly interests dictate that soon after winning the war with the Marhatahs, you should turn towards the forts of the Jats, and conquer them with the blessings from the hidden (occult) world. Next is the turn of the Sikhs. This group should also be defeated, while waiting for grace from Allah.
…I appeal to you in the name of Allah and his Prophet that you should not cast your eye on the property of any Muslim. If you take care in this regard, there is hope that the doors of victory will be opened to you one after another. But if this caution is ignored, I fear that the wails of the oppressed may become obstacles in the way towards your goal.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Najibuddaulah Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp.104-05.
From his letters

War , People , World , Fear

“The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy, as indeed of every philosophy, is happiness, but happiness that consists in living according to nature, and not according to the opinions of the multitude.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

As quoted in The Works of the Emperor Julian (1923) by Wilmer Cave France Wright, p. 39; also in The Missing Jesus: Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament (2003) by Craig Alan Evans, Carl A. Elliott, Bruce Chilton, Jacob Neusner
General sources

Nature , Happiness

“Wednesday (as Pocahontas): You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."
Becky (as Sarah Miller): Gary, she's changing the words!
Wednesday (as Pocahontas): And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.”

Paul Rudnick (1957) American playwright and screenwiter

See also
Addams Family Values (1993)

God , Pain , People , Home

“Hillary Clinton should be held accountable for her central role in destabilizing the Middle East. She voted to send the United States to war against Iraq, helped lead the disastrous withdrawal of American troops years later that created the vacuum allowing the rise of ISIS, and has never met a regime change she didn't like (which have all been disasters) – not to mention her invasion of Libya and her abandonment of American personnel in Benghazi. The loss of these lives in Libya is directly traceable to Clinton, but their families' testimonials were rejected by the media.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July

War , Family , Change , Loss

“Some think that He does not call her 'mother' but only 'woman' so as not to inflict a deeper wound of sorrow on her heart. I do not reject this; but another conjecture is no less probable, that Christ wanted to show that now that He has completed the course of human life, He puts off the condition in which He has lived and enters into the heavenly kingdom where He will rule over angels and men. For we know that Christ's custom always was to recall believers from looking at the flesh. This was especially necessary at His death.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Commentary on John 19:26
St John

Life , Death , Men , Angels

“Humans have super senses that appear sometimes in their dreams and sometimes in their daily lives”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Dreams , Sense , Appearance

“Democracy must be lived and practiced every day. It entails much more than periodic voting, which in many cases is only pro forma, in the absence of public influence on the choice of candidates and scarce possibility of policy change.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

“Much more than periodic voting” – UN Independent Expert calls for more direct democracy worldwide http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20482&LangID=E.
2016, “Much more than periodic voting” – UN Independent Expert calls for more direct democracy worldwide

Democracy , Change

“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Source: The Culture of Cities (1938), Ch. 7, sct. 16

World , Learning

“He lived year after year. He attended only to himself and to God and this picture-but he did not understand himself.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), p. 57

God , Understanding

“On whistling stormcloud; on Zephyrus wing,
The Spirit-choir loud the world-anthems sing;
Hark! List to their voice: "We have passed through death's door,
There's no Death; rejoice! life lives evermore."

We are, have always been, will ever be.
We are a portion of Eternity,
Older than Creation, a part of One Great Whole,
Is each Individual and immortal Soul.

On Time's whirring loom our garments we've wrought,
Eternally weave we on network of Thought,
Our kin and our country, by Mind brought to birth,
Were patterned in heaven ere molded on earth.

We have shone in the jewel and danced on the wave,
We have sparkled in fire, defying the grave;
Through shapes ever-changing, in size, kind and name
Our individual essence still is the same.

And when we have reached to the highest of all,
The gradations of growth our minds shall recall,
So that link by link we may join them together
And trace step by step the way we reached thither.

Thus in time we shall know, if only we do
What lifts, ennobles, is right and true.
With kindness to all, with malice to none,
That in and through us God's will may be done.”

Max Heindel (1865–1919) American asrologer and occultist

We Are Eternal (1911)
Source: http://www.rosicrucian.com/rms/rmseng01.htm http://www.rosicrucian.com/rms/rmseng01.htm

Life , Death , God , World

“Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvelousness But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, 'I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unraveling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms…. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

Life , Faith , Law , Penalty

“And what is the joy of Christ? The joy and delight which springs forever in His great heart, from feeling that He is forever doing good; from loving all, and living for all; from knowing that if not all, yet millions on millions are grateful to Him, and will be forever.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 78.

Love , Feeling , Spring , Heart

“In Geneva lived Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He too was a rebel, mighty in war. Voltaire was keener, wittier, deeper, greater. Rousseau was more fiery, emotional, passionate. Both were really warriors in the same great cause. From their different places, three miles apart, both sent forth their thunderbolts to wake a sleeping world. When the world awakened and shook itself, churches, thrones, institutions, laws, and customs were buried in the wreck. Some charged the wreck to Voltaire, some to Rousseau.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

War , World , Law , Sleep

“We have become accustomed to living our life with joy amidst pain and challenges”

Dana Reeve (1961–2006) Actress, singer, activist

Access Hollywood Interview (May 2005)

Life , Pain , Joy

“The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 34; Quote in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993. Computer Aided Systems Theory. p. 134

Faith , Question , Learning , Science

“I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Time , Perfection

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

War , People , Education , Disease

“I have never been frightened of anything. Because I fought British tommies to save the honor of an Indian lady, Gandhiji called me abhay sadhak, a fearless seeker of truth. When the sweepers of Warora challenged me to clean gutters, I did so. But that same person who fought goondas and British bandits quivered in fright when he saw the living corpse of TuIshiram, no fingers, no clothes, with maggots all over. That is why I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product. But the fact is I did it to overcome fear.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

On fear
Baba Amte's Words of Wisdom

Life , Truth , Fear , Help

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Earliest instance of this quote found on Google Books is the heading to a chapter entitled "How to Make Free Money From Your Website" from 2001 https://books.google.com/books?id=7ogreSDhbCEC&q=ghandi#v=snippet&q=ghandi&f=false, where it is attributed to "M. K. Ghandi" [sic].
Disputed

“Julia's original email says, "We have nothing to lose." But in the end they lost everything — their company, their lives, everything. And the ironic thing is, the procedure worked. The swarm actually solved the problem they had set for it.”

Michael Crichton Prey

Prey (2002)

Problem

“Do parallel universes exist? We don't know, uhm parallel universes are losing favor to the multiverse we have some cogent theoretical expectations that our universe might be just one of many spawned from this, sort of, this hyper-dimensional medium which we'll call the multiverse there's no data to support it but we have good theoretical premise to think that it's there and we have philosophical precedent we used to think Earth was special and unique. It wasn't, we got 8.. 9.. 8 planet we thought the Sun was special it's one of a hundred billion suns, the galaxy's special, no there's a hundred billion galaxies we have one universe or do we? The track record said why should there only be one? be open to the possibility that you don't live in the majority [looking? ] universe that's out there Would a separate universe.. when you say "different universe" slightly different laws of physics which (that's what I'm asking) oh this is the fun part because if you find, if you manage to get a portal to another universe don't be the first one to volunteer to go through because your atoms are working in this universe if a slightly different law of physics.. you could implode, explode come out with three heads who knows?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Neil deGrasse Tyson Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberley Academy - 2010-Jan-29 http://transcriptvids.com/v/YXh9RQCvxmg.html
2010s

Law , Support , Thinking , Universe

“Lets you and I try to live on food stamps in New Jersey (high cost of living) and feed a family for a week or month. U game?”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Fallon, Kevin, Cory Booker Rescues a Freezing Dog & 9 Other Things He Has Saved, https://www.thedailybeast.com/cory-booker-rescues-a-freezing-dog-and-9-other-things-he-has-saved?ref=scroll, 21 August 2018, The Daily Beast, January 26, 2013]
Via Twitter, in response to a tweet asking "Why is there a family today that is ‘too poor’ to afford breakfast?" Booker would go on to do exactly that. He later told CBS that it had been a "terrible state of human existence", and continued "I'll be honest with you. I take so much for granted, even going to Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee is more than my daily food allowance right now," as quoted in [Bailey, Holly, Cory Booker’s week on food stamps: political ambition amid the burned sweet potatoes, https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/ticket/cory-booker-week-food-stamps-political-ambition-amid-101008142--election.html, 21 August 2018, Yahoo! News, December 11, 2012]
2012

Family , Food , Game

“This capacity for imitation is possessed by savages, at least by the more intelligent ones, and it has deceived us time after time. The British are as gullible as we are. Hundreds and hundreds of times, at least, they gave scholarships to Blacks from Basutoland or Kenya or Nigeria or one of their other possessions, and the result was almost always the same. With the money given him, the savage bought himself a good wardrobe, attended an English school, learned to play soccer, attended Oxford, wrote a charming essay on Wordsworth or on ancient law, copulated with half-witted English women who thought him "romantic" and themselves "broad-minded," and when he got tired of living on English generosity, went home to his tribe where he had a well-roasted baby served up to him as a delicacy of which he had been long deprived by the stupid prejudices of the stupid British.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Women , Money , Stupidity , School

“[After struggle with heart disease] I've stopped eating meat, cheese, milk, even fish. No dairy at all. I've lost more than 20 pounds so far, aiming for about 30 before Chelsea's wedding. And I have so much more energy now! I feel great. … I just decided that I was the high-risk person, and I didn't want to fool with this anymore. And I wanted to live to be a grandfather. So I decided to pick the diet that I thought would maximize my chances of long-term survival. … The main thing that was hard for me actually … was giving up yogurt and hard cheese. I love that stuff, but it really made a big difference when I did it. … [To truly change the conditions that lead to bad habits and poor health] we have to demand it by changing the way we live. You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being, and that of your family and your country.”

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

" Bill Clinton Explains Why He Became a Vegan http://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-08-2013/bill-clinton-vegan.html" by Joe Conason, AARP The Magazine, August/September 2013.
2010s

Love , Health , Disease , Family

“I won't change and my perspective won't change. I want to continue my life the way I live it, and I'm not going to let anything stop me from doing that. It isn't all about acting. There's a lot more to life than Hollywood.”

Elijah Wood (1981) American actor

Hello Magazine http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/elijah-wood/

Life , Way , Change

“I would rather see Rome ruled by a man who once had to ask his accountant tricky questions before his steward could pay the butcher’s bill than by some mad limb like Nero, who was brought up believing himself the son and the grandson of gods, and who thought wearing the purple gave him free rein to indulge his personal vanities, execute real talent, bankrupt the Treasury, burn half of Rome – and bore the living daylights out of paying customers in theatres!”

Lindsey Davis book Shadows in Bronze

Shadows in Bronze

God , Question , Personality , Madness

“Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p. 55

Life , People

“The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
—A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.”

Shaw Neilson (1872–1942) Early twentieth century Australian poet

Ballad and Lyrical Poems (1923), "The Orange Tree"

Girl , Tree , Light

“Patanjali is considered the father of the yoga. On reality as far as we know, he was a yogi and polymath living around the fifth century BC, India, who collated and elaborated knowledge of the yogis’ life and practices. He wrote the Yoga Sutras, lierally a thread of aphorisms about yoga, consciousness and the human condition. Patanjali also explained the relationship between the natural world and the innermost and transcendent soul…. What Patanjali said applies to me and will apply to you.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x-xi

Life , World , Soul , Nature

“When the fight thickens the captain says, "Steady, boys;" and it is their steadiness which pulls the soldiers through. Fitful soldiers are rarely useful ones. That is our great need to-day, steady Christians — men and women you can count on. Many Christians are like intermittent springs. They flow to-day — to-morrow you cannot get a thimbleful of religious activity out of the dried channel of their lives.”

Francis Wayland (1796–1865) President of Brown University

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 248.

Women , Men , Spring , Boy

“The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Life , Death , Business , Change

“I intend to make this day forward the first day of the rest of my life. We can change our lives. You say, 'Well, what's wrong with your life, Michael?' Well, it's not that there's anything wrong with my life, but it's not what I want it to be. I don't feel that I'm inspiring people in the way I want to inspire them. You see, you can inspire through hate; you can inspire through love, hope, humor – the positives. I look at the history of the world, and I look at the world today, and I realize that if we don't inspire each other through positive attributes – love, hope and humor – we're gonna descend into the barbarism of the Left and the barbarism of ISIS. You like me to be hard, you like me to be tough, you like me to give you the breaking news, you like me to be cynical, you like me to analytical, you like me to give you stuff that you don't hear anywhere else – I get that. But there's a limit to that. There's a lot of area beyond all that.I think of Christmas. Christianity is the religion of peace. Christianity is the true religion of peace. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' These are messages that come from Christianity. What can you do in an age of deceit and lies and terror? You can go to church again. However un-needing you think you really are, you know in your heart that there's something missing in you. You know that you crave something greater. Because the human being is not a dog. We are unique creatures. And we need something different than the bear, the dog, the snake and the eagle. What is that thing that we need? It's that 'thing' called God.The media has promulgated the idea, and promoted the idea, that we only need food and fornication. And so when people are empty that's what they seek. And when they are really empty, what happens? They become drug addicts. They start with marijuana, they end up with heroin, crack, you name it. As God has been driven out of America, drugs have entered America. What does an empty soul look to do? An empty soul looks to fill itself. Just as an empty vessel needs to be filled with a liquid to be complete, an empty human being needs to fill itself to be complete. And how does it fill itself? I know, again, many of you will laugh because you're cynical; it's through those things I'm talking about – inspiration. Do you think a musician can play one day without inspiration from somewhere? The greatest artists in the history of the world were not drug-addicts. They were usually God-addicts. Look at the greatest art in history, you'll find most of them were super religious people, who literally saw God in their living room, and they took the power of God and that was transmitted through the paintbrush, or through that piece of marble. How could a man like Rodin take a piece of inert stone, and inside that stone see the essence of the human form, and sculpt from that block of inert stone, a marble, the portrait of a human being that looks so real – a hundred years later I go and look at them in the museum, and literally inside that carved eye I can see the person; how is that possible? How? It's a different show than I've ever done in my 21 years, because each day to me – I must tell you – I see as my last day, my last day on Earth.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015

Love , Life , God , Hate

“Philosophers and theologians, like the vulgar, prefer contradiction to enlightenment. They refute one another more gladly than they learn from one another, as though man lived by shunning error and not by loving truth. Accept their formulas and they sink back into their easy chairs and comfortably doze.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 171-172

Love , Truth , Error , Learning

“When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Of Plistarchus
Laconic Apophthegms

Life , Dead

“Thus today in the presence of all awakened Ones
I invite every living being to this festival
Giving both immediate and lasting joy.
May the gods and all others rejoice.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

Bodhicaryavatara

God , Joy

“Anti-intellectualism … first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 22-23

Education , Religion , Way , Thinking

“No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

Here is New York (1949)

“This Idea of Spinoza's we must allow to be in the main true and well-grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in order to be this, it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind; it may undoubtedly be said that this thought is the foundation of all true views — not, however, as their absolutely fixed and permanent basis, but as the abstract unity which mind is in itself. It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above … when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance, in which all that man has held as true has disappeared; this negation of all that is particular, to which every philosopher must have come, is the liberation of the mind and its absolute foundation.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, comparing Spinoza's philosophy to that of the Eleatics, in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1896), Vol. 3, Ch. I : The Metaphysics of the Understanding, § 2 : Spinoza, p. 257

Truth , Soul , Idea , Universe

“[T]he honour of a woman,— a true woman in China, is not only to love and be true to her husband, but to live absolutely, selflessly for him, In fact, this Religion of Selflessness is the religion of the woman, especially, the gentlewoman or lady in China, as the Religion of Loyalty which I have tried elsewhere to explain, is the religion of the man, — the gentleman in China.”

Gu Hongming book The Spirit of the Chinese People

page 82
The Spirit of the Chinese People (1915), Chinese Woman

Love , Religion , Loyalty

“With that she went and fetched the box in which she kept her many drugs, healing or deadly, and putting it on her knees she wept. Tears ran unchecked in torrents down her cheeks and drenched her lap as she bemoaned her own sad destiny. She was determined now to take a poison from the box and swallow it; and in a moment she was fumbling with the fastening of the lid in her unhappy eagerness to reach the fatal drug. But suddenly she was overcome by the hateful thought of death, and for a long time she stayed her hand in silent horror. Visions of life and all its fascinating cares rose up before her. She thought of the pleasures that the living can enjoy. She thought of her happy playmates, as a young girl will. And now, setting its true value on all this, it seemed to her a sweeter thing to see the sun than it had ever been before. So, prompted by Hera, she changed her mind and put the box away.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 802–818

Life , Death , Hate , Pleasure

“Father, perfect my trust;
Let my spirit feel in death,
That her feet are firmly set
On the rock of a living faith!”

Phoebe Cary (1824–1871) American writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 596.

Death , Faith , Feeling , Perfection

“The world for the most part is ruled by the tomb, and the living are tyrannized over by the dead. Old ideas, long after the conditions under which they were produced have passed away, often persist in surviving. Many are disposed to worship the ancient—to follow the old paths, without inquiring where they lead, and without knowing exactly where they wish to go themselves.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Is Divorce Wrong? (1889)

World , Idea , Parting , Dead

“David D. Friedman is the one of the most important living anarcho-capitalist philosophers. He has added a philosopher's insistence on consistency to the firm grasp of economic principles he presumably learned at the paternal knees.”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

In The Pragmatist. (1998), Vol.14, p. 77
About

Learning

“I am a fighter. I believe in the bright future of my country. I believe that the people of my country deserve a decent life, and I know that my people want to live in freedom.”

Roza Otunbayeva (1950) Soviet diplomat

"The Situation Is Not Easy" by Lally Weymouth in Newsweek (26 April 2010)

Life , People , Freedom , Future

“Men perish but principles live.”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910)

Men

“And what is death? It is the change in the living process of a particular body. Integration ends and disintegration sets in. (…) In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And the life is never so alive as after death.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Death
Source: "I am That." P.12.

Life , Death , Reality , Change

“the old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 47

Time , Dead

“Imam Ali said Nawf! Those are the fortunate people who adopt piety as the principle of their lives and are fully attentive to their welfare for the Hereafter. They accept bare earth as the most comfortable bed and water as the most pleasant drink. They adopt the Holy Qur'an and prayers as their guide and protector and like Prophet Jesus Christ (Isa) they forsake the world and its vicious pleasure.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

People , Pleasure , World , Drink

“The British representative was an ambassador, and had a spacious, suitable, and well-furnished house in which he could entertain fitly and largely, and to which the highest Russian officials thought it an honor to be invited. The American representatives were simply ministers; from time immemorial had never had such a house; had generally no adequate place for entertaining; had to live in apartments such as they might happen to find vacant in various parts of the town—sometimes in very poor quarters, sometimes in better; were obliged to furnish them at their own expense; had, therefore, never been able to obtain a tithe of that social influence, so powerful in Russia, which was exercised by the British Embassy.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White, Vol. 2 (1922), p. 19

Exercises , Time , Parting , Housing

“The fundamental maxim of free men is to live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will.”

Rudolf Steiner book Philosophy of Freedom

Philosophy of Freedom. Chapter 9, alternate translations
Source: Original: "Leben in der Liebe zum Handeln und Lebenlassen im Verständnisse des fremden Wollens ist die Grundmaxime der freien Menschen."

Love , Men , Understanding , Personality

“Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 35 (pp. 483-484).

War , Nature , Universe , Science

“Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm. It is this notion — that our race defines us -- that Ralph Ellison so eloquently rebuts in his essay, "The World and the Jug." He sees the lives of black people as more than a burden, but also a discipline, just as any human life which has endured so long is a discipline, teaching its own insights into the human condition, its own strategies of survival. There's a fullness and even a richness here. And here despite the realities of politics, perhaps, but nevertheless here and real because it is human life.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Life , People , World , Reality

“Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
And there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.”

Neil Young Old Man

Old Man
Song lyrics, Harvest (1972)

Life , Thinking

“If the earth is millions of years old, why don’t we have a fifty thousand year old Bristle Cone Pine tree someplace or a half a million year old? The age of the oldest living thing in the biosphere, the Bristle Cone Pine, indicates a young age for the earth. The evolutionists don’t look at that one because that doesn’t support their theory.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Age , Support , Tree

“We Europeans have to toil to achieve it, at least as a transitional stage, for it is what we feed our dreams upon. These Orientals [from India] have it in their blood, perhaps because they spend their lives I the sun. We poor wretched Europeans must sacrifice body and soul for even a shadow of it… It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy. And how Rembrandt used to copy Indian an Italian pictures. Not of course, because they were short of material, but to get 'du corps'. So one should be always drawing… Oh, you'd love the Indians. The pure, Aryan Indians, not those one could see in Berlin, whose forms had become rigid and sterile through mingling with the Chinese.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter to Nele van de Velde ((daughter of Henry van de Velde), from Frauenkirch, 1919/20; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1916 - 1919

Love , Dreams , Soul , Question

“At all times men have lived in societies, and ties of kinship and of simple neighbourhood underlie every form of social organization.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter I, Before Liberalism, p. 9.

Men , Time

“Our life is our own to-day, to-morrow you will be dust, a shade, and a tale that is told. Live mindful of death; the hour flies.”
Nostrum est<br/>quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies.<br/>vive memor leti, fugit hora.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Nostrum est
quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies.
vive memor leti, fugit hora.
Satire V, line 151.
The Satires

Life , Death

“To my mind, the great strength of your Society lies in its recognition of the necessity of discipline. We live in an impatient age. We demand results, and demand them at once. We find a long and laborious process very irksome, and are constantly seeking for a short cut. But there is no easy method of securing discipline. It is axiomatic that there is no royal road to learning. The effort for discipline must be intensive, and to a considerable degree it must be lifelong. But it is absolutely necessary, if there is to be any self-direction or any self-control. The worst evil that could be inflicted upon the youth of the land would be to leave them without restraint and completely at the mercy of their own uncontrolled inclinations. Under such conditions education would be impossible, and all orderly development intellectually or morally would be hopeless. I do not need to picture the result. We know too well what weakness and depravity follow when the ordinary processes of discipline are neglected.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Youth , Age , Education , Effort

“In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking become mechanical, our responses automatic. We can observe this very easily in ourselves.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, (1969)

Thinking , Parting

“And now because you are His child, live as a child of God; be redeemed from the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn all that is mean; hate all that is false; struggle with all that is impure Live the simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortality.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 314.

Life , God , Hate , Truth

“In June of 1776, Richard Henry Lee, rising before the Continental Congress to move his resolution for American independence, declared: “The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us; she demands of us a living example of freedom.””

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

Freedom

“I’d lived far too long, and with every day that passed the odds kept growing against my lasting much longer. Although they didn’t put it quite that way when giving the sales pitch, my insurance company’s attitude is reflected in the size of the premiums involved.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 7 (pp. 147-148)

Way

“I've been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don't keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it. Though I have to say rereading my diary for publication was a depressing experience. You shouldn't look back.”

Gyles Brandreth (1948) British writer, broadcaster and former Member of Parliament

WhatsonStage interview, 2010

Time , Reading

“The word "vegetarian" derives from the Latin "vegetus"—whole, sound, fresh, lively. The meat humans eat is neither whole, sound, fresh or lively. It is dis-limbed, tainted, decaying, stale and dead. A diet consisting of green leafy vegetables, root crops, grains, berries, nuts and fruits supplies all the body needs for strength and well-being. It is healthful food, aesthetic, economical, harmless to our brother animals, easy to grow, to prepare and to digest. Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Simple Food for the Good Life (1980), Ch. 4

Health , Food , Animals , Dead

“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.”

William McGonagall (1825–1902) weaver, actor, poet

The death toll was actually 75.
Poetry, The Tay Bridge Disaster (1880)

Beauty , Time

“The greatest American who ever lived has been shot down and killed.”

David Duke (1950) American White nationalist, white supremacist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Republican Louisiana …

Private conversation regarding the death of George Lincoln Rockwell (1967), quoted in The Rise of David Duke (1994) by Tyler Bridges

“First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded – it's simply not what I'm interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

-- 8/15/07 -- http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/TechGovernment/News.asp?id=44682&PageMem=2 --
Attributed

Life , Hate , People , World

“It [music] is the nourishment for my joy to live.”

Yoko Shimomura (1967) Japanese video game composer

WDR.de, Partituren für PC - Die virtuose Musik der Computerspiele http://www.wdr5.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Sendungen/Scala/2008/08/Manuskripte/08_20_MusikComputerspiele_01.pdf

Music , Joy

“Charles Haughey was undoubtedly a great statesman…By far the most gifted politician of his generation, he squandered his opportunities for greatness on luxuriant rhetoric and luxurious living.”

Charles Haughey (1925–2006) Irish politician

Fintan O'Toole, "A Life and Legacy". Irish Times, 14th June 2006.
About

“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.””

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.
Original: (Un)natural bridges from This bridge we call home

People , World , Feeling , Home

“The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.”

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) American academic

“The Challenge of Facts”, 1914 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1914sumner.html.

World

“Sometimes, I ask one, two, or more people just to sit in the audience and to listen to me with concentration as I play. It’s stimulating for me, and I try to build up a situation like that in a recital with a live audience. This helps me to play in a way that electrifies people.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on the audience and studio recordings

People , Way , Help

“This whole sphere, this whole world of Knowledge and the Master and, practicing, and devotion, and participation and all that— This is traditionally in India is called the path of devotion, bhakti marg. All the Masters came from this. All the Sikh gurus came from this. All the Masters you talked about came from this. It is regarded as the highest path, inclusive of Buddha— Because any time, any time there is a Master, wants to talk about a living thing, boomf. That's where they find themselves. And, amazingly, enough, it is not called the path of enlightenment, and it is not called the path of Knowledge, and it is not called the path of service, and all of those things, inclusive, it is then given the name. And the name is devotion.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Undated
Source: No Apprehension broadcasted in March 2002, recording date unknown

World , Knowledge , Time

“I've been to Sarajevo a few times and have got to know a lot of people there who put on plays during the siege. I wanted to share in that because I knew it was important to them... I began to see something of what was going on there in terms of actually keeping up people's spirit to resist - the resistance that causes change - even in the worst imaginable circumstances. And I realized that it paralleled the same spirit that existed during the Holocaust and in the gulag. Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. That experience changed me, because I realized that if, as actors or writers or directors or designers, we can keep the will to resist alive in as many people as possible, then that's what we are about, and that's what we can do. It's more and more important because of the terrible things that are happening in our cities and the political and economic agendas that various governments have.”

Vanessa Redgrave (1937) English actress

Shawn, Wallace (April 1997), “Mission: possible - interview with actress Vanessa Redgrave” http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_n4_v27/ai_19382618, Interview.

People , Imagination , Change , Time

“There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Life , Understanding , Reality

Quotes about living page 96

Quotes about living
page 96