The unsolicited, unreasoned and unapologetic ramblings of a very tired old Okie

Quotes

Quotes That I Like

  • Ansel Adams
    • “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”
  • Karen Armstrong
    • “I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.”
  • Anacharsis
    • “Written laws are like spiders’ webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.”
  • Peter Williams Atkins
    • “Theologians typically focus on questions that they have invented for their own puzzlement. Some theologians are perplexed by the nature of life after death, a notion they have invented without a scrap of evidence.“
  • Bill Balance
    • “When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.“
  • Manoel de Barros
    • “We need to look beyond this world. Reason confuses us.”
  • Leonardo Boff
    • “The opposite of poverty is not wealth – it is justice.”
  • Ray Bradbury
    • “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we are cynical. You’ve got to jump off the cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
  • Buddha
    • “Nothing is to be clung to as ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘mine’.“
  • George Burns
    • “I would rather be a failure doing something I love than a success doing something I hate.”
  • Edgar Cayce
    • “Be content, but not satisfied.“
  • G.K. Chesterton
    • “There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
  • Maurice Chevalier
    • “My own experience has taught me this: if you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won or lasting happiness achieved.”
  • Winston Churchill
    • “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”
  • Clarence Darrow
    • “I have always felt the doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and fear of God was the end of wisdom.”
  • James Dean
    • “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.”
  • Albert Einstein
    • “Only two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity. And I am not so sure about the former.”
    • “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
    • “People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live…[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” ~ in a letter to Otto Juliusburger
    • “The true value of a human being is determined primary by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” from The World As I See It
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”
    • “[People] measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is… Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” from Self Reliance
  • Enzo
    • “Understanding the truth is easy. Allowing oneself to experience it is often terribly difficult.“ from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
  • Epicurus
    • Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?“
  • Ben Frankin
    • “We all are born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.“
  • Mahatma Gandhi
    • “God has no religion.”
    • “One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.”
    • “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
  • Sydney J. Harris
    • “Being yourself is not remaining where you are, or being satisfied with what you are. It is a point of departure.”
  • Sir Edmund Hillary
    • “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”
    • “…if you set out on an adventure and you are absolutely convinced that you are going to be successful, why bother even starting.”
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
    • “A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born”
  • Thomas Jefferson
    • “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.”
    • “It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserves a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are
    • “Too often, our lives cease working because we cease working at life, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for things as they are, and to work with our difficulties.”
    • “Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just might have a chance to keep growing yourself.”
  • Garrison Keillor
    • “A book is a gift that you can open again and again.”
  • John F. Kennedy
    • “A child miseducated is a child lost”
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • “The time is always right to do what is right.”
  • Charles Kingsley
    • “When all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
  • Johann K. Lavater
    • “Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil and still more the man who is indifferent to everything.”
  • D. H. Lawrence
    • “Life is something to be spent, not to be saved.”
  • Abraham Lincoln
    • “The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”
  • Lin-yutang
    • “I have done my best, that is about all the philosophy of living that one needs.”
  • Charles Mackay
    • “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
  • Anais Nin
    • “There are few humans beings who receive the truth complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, like a mosaic.”
  • Tom Robbins
    • “Deep down, all of us probably are aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or barring that, to turn out a good juicy cheeseburger and strong glass of beer.”
  • Eleanor Roosevelt
    • “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    • “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
  • David S. Rush
    • “Life is simply a series of problems and puzzles to be solved. Relish the game. Enjoy the challenge.”
    • “If you do not have problems and puzzles to be solved, you are not living. “
  • Juanita C. Rush
    • “It is one thing to grow old with a man, it would be quite another thing to marry an old man.”
  • Betrand Russell
    • “Love at its fullest is an indissoluble combination of the two elements, delight and well-wishing.”
  • Florida Scott-Maxwell
    • “No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”
  • William Shakespeare
    • “Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.”
  • Socrates
    • “Wisdom begins in wonder.”
  • Charles R. Swindoll
    • “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.”
  • The Dalai Lama
    • “My religion is kindness.”
  • Mark Twain
    • “There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
  • Henry David Thoreau
    • “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me… We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium though which we look.. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
    • “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
  • Unknown
    • “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.”
    • “Don’t place your mistakes on your head, their weight may crush you.
      Instead, place them under your feet and use them as a platform to view your horizons.”
  • Voltaire
    • “The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.”
  • Kurt Vonnegut
    • “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!”
    • “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
    • “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
  • John Wayne
    • “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.”
    • “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
    • “If you don’t respect your elders, then I’ll just have to teach you to respect your betters.”
  • Oscar Wilde
    • “There is no sin except stupidity.”
    • “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
    • “I am not young enough to know everything.”
    • “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. “
    • “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. “
  • Gerrand Winstanley
    • “While men are gazing up to Heaven, imagining after a happiness, or fearing a Hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what is their birthright.”