Quotes about use
page 50

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Music, Nature

“We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Truth

“Percy’d heard stories about amputees who had phantom pains where their missing legs
and arms used to be. That’s how his mind
felt—like his missing memories were aching.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Pain, Memory

“Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"…. I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort," I said to my father.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

“My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity… and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Pleasure, Thinking

“Grace is the power of the Holy Spirit coming to us free of charge to enable you to do with ease what you could never do on your own with any amount of struggle and effort.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Effort

“It's not what happens to us that molds us. It's what we do with what happens to us.”

Anita Stansfield (1961) American writer

Source: Where the Heart Leads

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Shadow & Claw

Truth

“When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Dead

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Pain, Thinking

“The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Problem

“She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.”

Mark Helprin (1947) US author, journalist, commentator

Sleep, Dead

“Most of us remain strangers to ourselves, hiding who we are, and ask other strangers, hiding who they are, to love us.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Love

“Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

“We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.”

Kamila Shamsie (1973) Pakistani writer

Understanding, Thinking, Memory, Forgetting

“I couldn’t miss Percy’s fifteenth birthday,” Poseidon said. “Why, if this were Sparta, Percy would be a man today!”

"That’s true,” Paul said. “I used to teach ancient history.”

Poseidon’s eyes twinkled. “That’s me. Ancient history.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

History, Birthday

“Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.”

Michael Palin (1943) British comedian, actor, writer and television presenter

"Letter from London" (18 September 2003) http://palinstravels.co.uk/static-51?topic=1752&forum=12 <br class="br">Context: Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won’t be made safer by creating barriers between people. Cries of “They’re evil, let’s get ‘em” or “The infidels must die” sound frightening, but they’re desperately empty of argument and understanding. They’re the rallying cries of prejudice, the call to arms of those who find it easier to hate than admit they might be not be right about everything.<br>Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

People, World, Hope, Future

“Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

Source: The Periodic Table

Feeling, Mountain

“Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Happiness, Books, Reading

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Feeling

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."

Life, History, Time

“She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Children, Parent

“Sometimes choice is a luxury that fate does not afford us.”

Jasper Fforde book The Last Dragonslayer

Source: The Last Dragonslayer

Fate

“For I have seen it and I have felt it and it is love, not death, that undoes us.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Love, Death

“The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Change, Time, Courageous

“Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

“If all we've got to look forward to is disloyalty and treachery, why do we even make friends?"
"Again, human nature. Hoping for the best is what drives us.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Intertwined

Hope, Nature

“The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey

Life, Imagination

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

World

“For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Sense, Memory

“It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Context: Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.

Way, Knowledge, Thinking, Science

“It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Idea, Thinking

“If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Mercy

God

“We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

Source: The Third Man (1949)

People

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Life, Death, World, Imagination

“Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Animals make us Human.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Animals

“There is absolutely no substitute for the best. Good food cannot be made of inferior ingredients masked with high flavor. It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.”

James Beard (1903–1985) American chef

Food

“But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Source: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Way

“You can use your time to build bridges or walls. The latter is not only unChristlike, it limits impact & creates loneliness.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Time, Loneliness

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

God, Forgiveness, Time

“Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.”

Emily Giffin book Where We Belong

Source: Where We Belong

Way, Past, Future

“The baby!’ Nico grinned, which hurt his face muscles. He wasn’t used to making that expression. ‘Mellie and the kid are all right?”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Hurt, Baby

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

Sleep, Universe

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”

Werner Heisenberg book The Part and The Whole

Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann. <br class="br">Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) http://www.zeit.de/1969/34/kein-chaos-aus-dem-nicht-wieder-ordnung-wuerde/komplettansicht; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)

Understanding