Quote of the Day archive

From BillionQuotes

This page lists all "Quotes of the Day" that have been chosen for the current year.

See also: Quote of the day - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - Complete list - Quote of the Day proposals (an archive)

Latest quotations are listed first:

Contents 1 May 2006 2 April 2006 3 March 2006 4 February 2006 5 January 2006 6 Previous Quote of the Day archives

May 2006

• "What I do know for certain is that what is regarded as success in a rational materialistic society only impresses superficial minds. It amounts to nothing and will not help us rout the destructive forces threatening us today. What may be our salvation is the discovery of the identity hidden deep in any one of us, and which may be found in even the most desperate individual, if he cares to search the spiritual womb which contains the embryo of what can be one's personal contribution to truth and life." ~ Patrick White

• "Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver." ~ Harlan Ellison

• "When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right." ~ Ward Cunningham

• They reckon ill who leave me out;
  When me they fly, I am the wings;
  I am the doubter and the doubt,
  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

• "Every failure is a step to success." ~ William Whewell

• "Cynicism isn't smarter, it's only safer. There's nothing fluffy about optimism." ~ Jewel

• A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
  There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
  And drinking largely sobers us again.
  ~ Alexander Pope ~

• "A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." ~ Alexander Pope

• "Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation." ~ Honoré de Balzac

• "Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious — that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment." ~ Dan Brown

• A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
  Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
  ~ Omar Khayyám ~

• "There is no formula to it because writing every song, for me, is a little journey... It's everything. It's the walk you take in the morning, it's the night before, the meeting with people, landscapes, the chats, all of that evolves in some way into melody, but I'm not sure how it's going to happen. I'm dealing with the unknown all the time and that is exciting." ~ Enya

• "I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you." ~ Studs Terkel

• "The voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away." ~ Katherine Anne Porter

• "It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly discern that by so acting they will inevitably create misery to themselves." ~ Robert Owen

• "'Fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words." ~ Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light

• "Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn." ~ Douglas MacArthur

• "Positive vibrations man. That's what makes it work. That's reggae music. You can't look away because it's real. You listen to what I sing because I mean what I sing, there's no secret, no big deal. Just honesty, that's all." ~ Bob Marley

• "The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise." ~ Karl Barth

• "The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us." ~ Nelson Mandela

• "While in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes." ~ Friedrich Hayek

• "The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation." ~ Rabindranath Tagore

• "Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action." ~ Sigmund Freud

• "Once you label me you negate me." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

• "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this." ~ T. H. Huxley

• "Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't." ~ Pete Seeger

• "We are near waking when we dream that we dream." ~ Novalis

• "I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

April 2006

• "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

• "Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people — the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest." ~ Hirohito

• "War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost." ~ Karl Kraus

• "The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." ~ Edward Gibbon

• "Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to." ~ Marcus Aurelius

• "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." ~ Edward R. Murrow

• "The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him." ~ Robert Penn Warren

• "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." ~ William Shakespeare in As You Like It

• "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more." ~ Vladimir Nabokov

• "This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." ~ John Muir

• "Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away." ~ Dinah Craik

• By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
  Here once the embattled farmers stood;
  And fired the shot heard round the world.
  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

• "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means." ~ Clarence Darrow

• "Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence." ~ Karen Blixen

• "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

• "Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena." ~ Leonhard Euler

• "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

• "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." ~ Thomas Jefferson

• "Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed." ~ Tom Clancy

• "A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others." ~ Leo Rosten

• "Any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality." ~ George William Russell

• "I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings — and I hate people like that!" ~ Tom Lehrer

• "Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule." ~ Gautama Buddha

• Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
  To me the meanest flower that blows can give
  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
  ~ William Wordsworth ~

• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." ~ Isaac Asimov

• "Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe." ~ Thomas Hobbes

• "There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory." ~ Sir Francis Drake

• "There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place." ~ Washington Irving

• "Whether it is happy or unhappy, a man's life is the only treasure he can ever possess." ~ Giacomo Casanova

• "The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year." ~ Mark Twain

March 2006

• "When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So, it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life." ~ Cesar Chavez

• "Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything." ~ Archilochus

• "Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way." ~ Stanisław Lem

• "I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time." ~ Buck Owens

• "All knowledge is oriented toward some object and is influenced in its approach by the nature of the object with which it is pre-occupied. But the mode of approach to the object to be known is dependent upon the nature of the knower." ~ Karl Mannheim

• He acts without contact,
  instructs without meeting,
  guides without pointing.
  Desires do not conflict with Him,
  thoughts do not mingle with Him:
  His essence is without qualification,
  His action without effort.
  ~ Mansur al-Hallaj ~

• "A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know." ~ Ward Cunningham

• "With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on." ~ William Morris

• "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" ~ Patrick Henry

• "As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway." ~ Anne Hutchinson

• "The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." ~ Jean Cocteau

• "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom — these are the pillars of society." ~ Henrik Ibsen

• Who save the madman dares to cry: "'Tis I am right, you all are wrong"?
  "You all are right, you all are wrong," we hear the careless Soofi say,
  "For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day."
  ~ Sir Richard Francis Burton ~

• "The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party." ~ John C. Calhoun

• "Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof." ~ "V" in V for Vendetta

• "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." ~ Raymond Chandler

• "Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces." ~ Julius Caesar

• "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." ~ Albert Einstein

• "Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world." ~ Hugh Walpole

• "Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite." ~ Edward Albee

• "Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." ~ Douglas Adams

• "All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome." ~ Kate Sheppard

• "Some choices will choose you. How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life." ~ Dana Reeve

• "The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

• Burn all the statutes and their shelves:
  They stir us up against our kind;
  And worse, against ourselves.
  We have a passion — make a law,
  Too false to guide us or control!
  And for the law itself we fight
  In bitterness of soul.
  And, puzzled, blinded thus, we lose
  Distinctions that are plain and few:
  These find I graven on my heart:
  That tells me what to do.
  ~ William Wordsworth in "Rob Roy's Grave" ~

• "Give thought to life and liberty." ~ Cyrano de Bergerac

• "Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters." ~ Rosa Luxemburg

• There was a young fellow from Trinity,
  Who took the square root of infinity.
  But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets;
  He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
  ~ George Gamow ~

• "In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems." ~ Georg Cantor

• "Our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: 'Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'" ~ Carl Schurz

• I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
  But whether this was false or honest dreaming
  I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.
  ~ Richard Wilbur ~

February 2006

• "If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away." ~ Linus Pauling

• Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
  "Life is but an empty dream!"
  For the soul is dead that slumbers,
  And things are not what they seem.
  ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~

• "Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." ~ Theodore Sturgeon

• "That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters." ~ Anthony Burgess

• "Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves." ~ Chester Nimitz

• "Man is always something more than what he knows of himself.  He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process..." ~ Karl Jaspers

• "I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy." ~ George Washington

• "When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with." ~ Anaïs Nin

• "We picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
  The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

• "External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself." ~ Amy Tan

• "At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can." ~ Toni Morrison

• "Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen." ~ Michael Jordan

• "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." ~ Henry Adams

• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." ~ Galileo Galilei

• "Some things you don't need until they leave you; they're the things that you miss." ~ Rob Thomas

• "Life is what it is, and you take what's handed, and you work as hard as you can, and hopefully you'll be successful, but I just don't spend too much time worrying about that." ~ Jerry Springer

• "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." ~ Abraham Lincoln

• "When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear." ~ René Descartes

• "What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth." ~ Boris Pasternak

• "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?" ~ Mrs Patrick Campbell

• "There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess." ~ John Ruskin

• "He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true." ~ Thomas More

• "You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course." ~ Ronald Reagan

• "What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us—what convictions, what courage, what faith—win or lose." ~ Adlai Stevenson

• "If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed." ~ Charles Lindbergh

• "An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." ~ James A. Michener

• "There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens." ~ Coretta Scott King

• I've known rivers:
  I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
  flow of human blood in human veins.
  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
  ~ Langston Hughes ~

January 2006

• "Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = magic." ~ Grant Morrison

• "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

• "Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace." ~ Milan Kundera

• "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." ~ Colette

• "If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." ~ Lewis Carroll

• "I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end." ~ Douglas MacArthur

• "While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace." ~ Virginia Woolf in Orlando

• Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
  To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
  ~ William Congreve ~

• "To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security." ~ Walter M. Miller, Jr.

• "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." ~ Robert E. Howard

• "So far as prejudice, or prepossession of opinion prevails over our minds, in the same proportion, reason is excluded from our theory or practice. Therefore if we would acquire useful knowledge, we must first divest ourselves of those impediments and sincerely endeavor to search out the truth: and draw our conclusions from reason and just argument, which will never conform to our inclination, interest or fancy but we must conform to that if we would judge rightly." ~ Ethan Allen

• "I don't understand politics. I don't understand the concept of two sides. And I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground. But it never seems to come to the middle ground. And it's very frustrating watching it, and seemingly we're not moving forward." ~ David Lynch

• "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." ~ Edgar Allan Poe

• "There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world." ~ Robert Anton Wilson

• "Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day." ~ Benjamin Franklin

• "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love... I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

• "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." ~ Jimmy Wales

• "Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage." ~ Albert Schweitzer

• "I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul." ~ Émile Zola

• "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." ~ Edmund Burke

• "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." ~ Alexander Hamilton

• Know that however ugly the parts appear
  the whole remains beautiful...
  ... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
  of the universe. Love that, not man
  Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
  or drown in despair when his days darken.
  ~ Robinson Jeffers ~

• "Life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds." ~ Karel Čapek

• "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk." ~ Stephen Hawking

• "There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in." ~ Gerald Durrell

• "In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt

• "Evil spreads with the wind; truth is capable of spreading even against it." ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

• "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." ~ Isaac Newton

• "Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?" ~ Cicero

• "How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection...That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." ~ Isaac Asimov

• "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." ~ E. M. Forster

Previous Quote of the Day archives

• Quote of the day archive 2005
• Quote of the day archive 2004
• Quote of the day archive 2003
• Complete list (2003 - present)
• Quote of the Day proposals (archive)

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