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Christopher Adams's Scrapbooks:

Great Presidential Quotations (6 quotations)

Best of C.S. Lewis (5 quotations)

Best of Tolkien (1 quotations)

Best of John Henry Newman (1 quotations)

Best of Einstein (7 quotations)

Christmas (2 quotations)

Ernest Hemingway (3 quotations)

The thing with feathers (9 quotations)

On Programming (47 quotations)

Best of Karl Rahner (1 quotations)

Praise of Leibniz (3 quotations)

LucasArts trivia (4 quotations)

Good Engineering and Good Products (5 quotations)

Antoni Gaudí (5 quotations)

Temp (6 quotations)

Humor (1 quotations)

Transitions Retreat: March 2015 (7 quotations)

What Christopher Adams has saved (not yet in Scrapbooks):

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

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Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

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Dafoe says he saw his relationship to acting shift in tandem with the stages of life. He started out an extrovert, performing for the attention. Then it turned into an adult affair: “Once you start working, you use that as a means to survive.” For those who stick with it, the study of the craft takes over; the extroversion turns inward. “And then,” he says, “it becomes like a spiritual thing — to find your connection with all things.” He seems, in one sense, to be racing against time — to be seizing on his hard-won status to work as often as possible, in roles that are as physical and challenging as possible, while he still can. Other actors slow down over the years; for Dafoe, a sense of mortality makes all the more compelling his desire to “melt into things,” as he says, choosing parts that connect him to something bigger than himself.

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New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war ... we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.

-FDR

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All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories.

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There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

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Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such a friend.

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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

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“As Michael Walzer has argued, the Jewish and Christian sense of Exodus, of a possible liberation through and after affliction and slavery, has been so compelling over time because it is based essentially on a promise. The Exodus story is both so powerful and so adaptable because it is not an account of miracles, of merely waiting for God’s intercessions. God will choose moments to intervene, but the great Exodus narrative gets “God’s people marching,” writes Walzer, “through the world to a better place in it.” Hence, the Old Testament story can be such a source of “radical hope” if people possess sufficient faith; they can march off with expectation that “the world is not all Egypt.” Douglass believed events gave evidence that a “moral chemistry” and an interventionist God now drove history forward. He had rehearsed for this moment for more than twenty years; a prophet issues the warnings and must be ready to reap history’s results. Words, faith, inspiration, and an abiding pathos, argues Abraham Heschel, are the prophetic stock-in-trade. A prophet spares no piety; he is an “assaulter of the mind.” The words of a true prophet, says Heschel, are “a scream in the night” rooted in a sense of history.9 And timing may be all. With a reasoned scream, Douglass discerned that Babylon might now be falling.”

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He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.

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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

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Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

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Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

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It's not the towering sails, but the unseen wind that moves a ship.

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Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build my castle.

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Every one of us has been warmed by fires he did not build and has drunk from wells he did not dig.

-Unknown

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A problem well stated is half-solved.

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Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.

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I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

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The difficult we do today. The impossible takes a little longer.

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For a _large_ class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for _all_—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how; instruct them how the mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.

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I am an old man, and have known a great deal of troubles, but most of them never happened.

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Now [my friend] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

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Is the universe a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a great accident or a great thought?

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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades, but fading pleasures brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all they might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.

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The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

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A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whole blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete.

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He is happy because he has nothing, but he has everything.

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Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and groveling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.

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There are seasons in every country, when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamours of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.

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I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

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Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it--still more, because of it--that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.'

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As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one's teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches--then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one's own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.

But she doubted whether she were now capable of any such withdrawal. She had long ago taken the step that put the grey-walled paradise of Oxford behind her. No one can bathe in the same river twice, not even in the Isis. She would be impatient of that narrow serenity--or so she told herself.

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They can't take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutum est quod Juniories Senioribus debitam et congruam reverentiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence.

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We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a "normal" day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookham pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the taproom the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes. At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, in Arthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.

The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it as Bookham on those (happily numerous) occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was out; the Knock himself disdained this meal. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell, and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang's History of English Literature. Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholy are all good for the same purpose. At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven. But when is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing the happy life I led with Kirk or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock.

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United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

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The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.

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"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

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When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier, any such professionalism would have been greeted with patrician disdain. Those of my colleagues who had actually bothered to finish their Ph.D.’s would sometimes use the title of "Mr." rather than "Dr.," since "Dr." suggested a degree of ungentlemanly labor. Publishing books was regarded as a rather vulgar project. A brief article every 10 years or so on the syntax of Portuguese or the dietary habits of ancient Carthage was considered just about permissible. There had been a time earlier when college tutors might not even have bothered to arrange set tutorial times for their undergraduates. Instead, the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.

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Hoist up sail while gale doth last,
Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure;
Seek not time when time is past,
Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.
After-wits are dearly bought,
Let thy forewit guide thy thought.

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There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

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If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to useful or believe to be beautiful.

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We can know more than we can tell.

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By all means use sometimes to be alone.
Salute thy self: see what thy soul doth wear.
Dare to look in thy chest; for ’tis thine own:
And tumble up and down what thou find’st there.

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Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.
...
And any thing I have I bestow.

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At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

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In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well
as forward sluing,
To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object
missing,
Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

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There is no way to peace; peace is the way.

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The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.
Make a hairsbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.

Tags: buddhism x |

And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.

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I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
I’m not screwing around. It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.
Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy of love and belonging, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever.
Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through you. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.

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And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

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The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

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One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.

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Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world; one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound.

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One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not, we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors, we're not that way from perversity. And we cannot just relax and let it go. We've learned to cope in ways you never had to.

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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

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It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

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Sed mundus diligit concordiam. Et, si fieret discordia elementorum, dissolueretur
et mundus.

But the world strives towards concord. And, if the elements fall into dischord, so dissolves the world.

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Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

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For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity [the Big Bang].

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[Nature] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

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The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

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The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

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This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Tags: alienation x | economics x | freedom x | ocean x | seafaring x | suicide x |

When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.

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The way of [religion] is a living response to a living question. Yet whenever it has become institutionalized, its vital response has become a well formulated answer. The seemingly important task of preserving a particular set of answers often causes the very questions which gave rise to the answers to be forgotten. Then the lucid answers [religion] provides are cut off from the stammering voice that asks the questions.

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When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) / It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.

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So, yeah, between Apocalypse and Gandhi there were about four years, and they were years of reflection, and alcohol abuse, and insecurity, and anger, and resentment, and a near breakup with my family. But I was searching for that elusive thing that all of us search for. Most of the time we’re not even conscious of it, but we’re searching for ourselves in an authentic way. We want to recognize the person we see in the mirror, and embrace that person with all the brokenness and lackluster, all the things that only we are aware of in the depths of our being.

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I never really had a consciousness about what I wanted to do. And I knew — and I think all children know at a very, very young age something about themselves, deeply personal, that is almost impossible to communicate with any understanding to anyone else. But I had this as well, and I started going to movies, I guess, I was around five or six, and gradually it dawned on me that I was like one of those people I was looking at on the screen. And it was a revelation, and it was a great sense of peace overcame me as a child, because I knew that it was possible that I could do that. In fact, it was more than that I could do that. It was that I was that already.

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The love that I longed for, and I think all of us really long for, is knowing that we are loved. A knowingness about our being that unites us to all of humanity, to all of the universe. That despite ourselves, we are loved.

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What we love, others will love, and we will show them how.

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May he long continue composing and playing, disregarding cant and fashion while nurturing his loving circle of colleagues and friends, teaching us by his unmatched example how to live joyfully and virtuously.

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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

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'Healing',
Papa would tell me,
'is not a science,
but the intuitive art
of wooing Nature.'

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If there were a list of things that make me more comfortable, a list would be at the top of that list.

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We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once... We must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation.

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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

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The thing is, the high I get at 2001 is just dancin'. It's not -- it's not being the best or nothing like that. The thing is, I would like to get that high someplace else in my life. ... I don't know where. I don't know. Someplace. You see, dancin' can't live forever. It's a short-lived kind of thing. But I'm getting older, you know, and--. I feel like, you know, so what, I'm getting older. Does that mean I can't feel that way about nothing left in my life? Is that it?

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Therefore, unmitigated seriousness betokens a lack of virtue because it wholly despises play, which is as necessary for a good human life as rest is.

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Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

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Politics without Principle
Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Morality
Science without Humanity
Religion without Sacrifice

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It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

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I dipped my pen, and began to write the lines that must be there, for the sake of the unknown physician who would follow me.

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I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

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I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

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The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

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All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fruitfly.

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Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —
Except that then my mind was struck by lightning
Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.
Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,
By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

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The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.

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Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.

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How many times have you noticed that it's the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning?

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The motion picture will never fully replace the printed word, but it will go a long way in becoming its most valuable adjunct. There seems little question that the human mind will absorb picturized information much quicker by means of the printed word

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Nothing in a lifetime of picture making has been more exciting and personally satisfactory than delving into the wonders, the mysteries, the magnificent commonplaces of life around us and passing them on via the screen.

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Because the eye is the most sensitive and dependable of our sense organs, the motion picture offers the widest, direct avenue to out emotions. Whereas the still picture can suggest only a fragment of fact of fiction, the cartoon-in-motion is without limit in communicating ideas, events and human relations

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Love is the bridge between you and everything.

-Rumi

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Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

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If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

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WE are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Tags: creation x | creativity x | music x | technology x |

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

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There is no longer any question of adding to the old rules new principles which are the natural expression of time and experience, but simply of casting aside all rules and every restraint. "Everyone ought to make his own rules. Music is free and unlimited in its liberty of expression. There are no perfect chords, dissonant chords or false chords. All aggregations of notes are legitimate." That is called, and they believe it, the development of taste.

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My favorite content delivery platform is libraries.

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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For the last 150 years academic libraries have seen themselves as information-centred storehouses of books and I think that was a mistake ... We need to return to the original purpose of the library, which is to support all the various needs of the scholar and provide him or her with a place to come up with ideas and make breakthroughs that would not otherwise have happened.

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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.

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How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown. – Parmenides This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was and will be an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.

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Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

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Far and away the best prize life has to offer is working hard at work worth doing.

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We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Tags: innovation x | twitter x |

The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.
Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.
O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes.
Through many a volt the Weber flew,
And clicked this answer back to me;
I am thy Farad staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.

Tags: love x | technology x |

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end … But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you … Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

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I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today — and even professional scientists — seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historical and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

Tags: education x | philosophy x | philosophy of science x |

For what it's worth ... it's never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things that you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you're not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

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In the future we'll be found, riding swiftly underground

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[The New York electric trolley car] is fast abolishing the horrors of the crowded tenement. It is shortening the hours of labor. It makes the poor man a land-holder. It is doing more to put down socialism, in this country at least, than all other things combined.

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In the morning, there is one incessant stream of people – employed in New York on business – tending toward the ferry. ... They rush forward as if for dear life, and woe to the fat woman or unwieldy person of any kind, who stands in their way.

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There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

Tags: democracy x | libraries x | public works x |

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is "Thank you," that will be enough.

Tags: gratitude x | prayer x |

[I am] not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.

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The pond is plenteous
The land is lush,
and having turned off the news

I am for the moment mellow.

With my book in one hand
and my drink in the other
What more could I want

But fame,
Better health,
And ten million dollars?

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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

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Devon is sometimes considered the most beautiful school in New England, and even on this dismal afternoon its power was asserted. It is the beauty of small areas of order - a large yard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses - living together in contentious harmony. You felt that an argument might begin again any time; in fact it had: out of the Dean's Residence, a pure and authentic Colonial house, there now sprouted an ell with a big bare picture window. Some day the Dean would probably live entirely encased in a house of glass and be happy as a sandpiper. Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself.

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The internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand … [It] is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws … This is the Internet, the world’s largest ungoverned space.

Tags: anarchy x | internet x |

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like ... the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

Tags: city life x | flâneurie x |

You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

Tags: freedom x | life x | work x |

I always comfort myself by saying that Christianity is only two days old (a thousand years are as one day in the sight of God) and so it is only a couple of days that are past and now it is about time we ... begin tomorrow morning and say, "now I have begun."

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My new computer came with Windows 7. Windows 7 is much more user-friendly than Windows Vista. I don't like that.

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I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and... think at some point, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

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Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyperverbosity and prolixity.

-Unknown

Tags: humor x | writing x |

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.

Tags: religion x | science x |

Ask the beasts and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth and they will instruct you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.

Tags: gaia x | nature x | revelation x |

We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.

Tags: knowledge x | wisdom x |

Anxiety happens when we’ve forgotten to delight in the present moment.

Tags: anxiety x | delight x |

Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely. That's the thing that people don't get.

Tags: ambition x | entrepreneurship x | failure x |

Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this that was this big and this important and this great will never die. Oh, for a few years, maybe many years, It will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented in caricature and sneered at, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh at John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, white polyester suits and platorm shoes and going like *this*, but we had nothing to do with those things and still love disco. Those who didn't understand will never understand. Disco was much more, and much better, than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever. It's got to come back some day. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.

Tags: disco x | whit stillman x |

I'm going to turn over a new leaf in Spain. I'm going to turn over several new leaves. You know that Shakespearean admonition "to thine own self be true?" It's premised on the idea that "thine own self" is something pretty good being true to which is commendable. But what if "thine own self" is not so good? What if it's pretty bad? Wouldn't it be better, in that case, not to be true to thine own self? -- See? That's my situation.

Tags: integrity x | whit stillman x |

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

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We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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Better to pray one psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction.

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"How was your day?" "Well, you know, I'm a physicist. So I thought about stuff." "That's it?" "I wrote some of it down."

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Wherefore the division and appropriation of things which are based on human law, do not preclude the fact that man's needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor. For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., 2, Objection 3] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): "It is the hungry man's bread that you withhold, the naked man's cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man's ransom and freedom."

Since, however, there are many who are in need, while it is impossible for all to be succored by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another's property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.

Tags: ambrose x | aquinas x | law x | politics x | poverty x | redistribution x | theft x | wealth x |

In 1935, Erwin Schrodinger, in an attempt to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, proposed an experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a sealed vial of poison that will break open at a random time. Now, since no-one knows when or if the poison has been released, until the box is opened, the cat can be thought of as both alive and dead. Just like Schrodinger’s Cat, your potential relationship with Leonard right now can be thought of as both good and bad. It is only by opening the box that you’ll find out which it is.

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The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.

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I am large, I contain multitudes.

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The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they're not crazy. If technology is purely market-driven and we don't focus innovation on the big inequities, then we could have amazing inventions that leave the world even more divided. We won't improve public schools. We won't cure malaria. We won't end poverty. We won't develop the innovations poor farmers need to grow food in a changing climate. If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channeled our optimism, we would see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools, we would answer with our innovations, and we would surprise the pessimists.

Tags: inequality x | optimism x | pessimism x |

We need to be ambitious but stay humble, we need to work hard
and have fun. We need to learn from the smart critics, ignore the dumb
haters, and maintain our sense of humor. We need to keep
experimenting, not get risk averse, and focus on the long term. There
will be ups and downs along the way. But there is no reason we can’t
succeed. We are already on our way.

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INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake ... INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait of combining imagination and reliability. Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority come into play. Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel ... This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals ... Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense.

Tags: intj x | myers-briggs x |

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.

Tags: enigma x | history x | humor x | key x | mystery x | riddle x |

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal-- if you reach it at all -- feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game. ... If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure. ... Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

Tags: goals x | systems x |

We offer 3 kinds of service:
Good, cheap, fast.
but you can only pick two.

Good and cheap won't be fast.
Fast and good won't be cheap.
Cheap and fast won't be good.

-Unknown

Tags: humor x | tradeoffs x |

I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

-Unknown

Tags: cats x | wisdom x |

It was so easy living day by day, out of touch with the rhythm and blues.

Tags: new york city x |

I saw the lights go out on Broadway.

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I feel empowered.

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Even when you’re far from home, exhausted, coughing, missing your girlfriend, and grinding uphill in the rain, where you are is where you belong. Never wish away distance. Never wish away time.

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Analogy is our best guide in all philosophical investigations;
and all discoveries, which were not made by mere accident,
have been made by the help of it .

Tags: analogy x | philosophy x | scientific method x |

BEFORE IT'S A TREND,
IT'S A SHIFT. BEFORE IT'S A
CHANGE, IT'S AN OPPORTUNITY.
AND BEFORE YOU KNOW IT,
IT'S GONE.

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A goal is a dream with a deadline.

-Unknown

Tags: deadlines x | dreams x | goal x |

Not where I breathe, but where I love I live.

Tags: life x | love x |

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

Tags: ice cream x | simplicity x |

You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.

Tags: indirectly x | rushing x |

A man with a discerning taste for clothing, Theodore had his Rough Rider uniform tailored by Brooks Brothers and his safari outfit by Abercrombie and Fitch.

Tags: brooks brothers x | rough riders x | safari x | teddy roosevelt x | uniforms x |

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Tags: Unix x | Unix philosophy x |

Even though the UNIX system introduces a number of innovative programs and techniques, no single program or idea makes it work well. Instead, what makes it effective is the approach to programming, a philosophy of using the computer. Although that philosophy can't be written down in a single sentence, at its heart is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves. Many UNIX programs do quite trivial things in isolation, but, combined with other programs, become general and useful tools.

Tags: simplicity x | unix x |

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Tags: correctness x | criticism x |

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

Tags: mysticism x | politics x |

Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.

Tags: boxing x | plans x | surprise x | unexpected x |

What is to give light must endure burning.

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You can't steer a ship that's not underway.

-Unknown

Tags: beginnings x |

Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms.

-Unknown

Tags: weirdness x |

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Tags: certainty x | judgment x | knowledge x |

It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.

Tags: dark x | dawn x |

to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Tags: integrity x |

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it -- overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

Tags: New York City x |

When a man's relation to the divine radically changes and his life and mind open in ways he could not have imagined, he is inclined to think of the transformation in terms of progression -- from a lower consciousness to a higher one, or from benighted despair to enlightened joy. This is the first mistake. The second is his immediate desire to lift others, particularly those he loves, into this new state of awareness. But faith is not a new life in this sense; it is the old life, newly seen.

Tags: faith x | transformation x | vision x |

When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor they call me a communist.

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A day's attack of the blues ... will not drive away your desire, your necessity, which is to exercise those creative faculties which a kind providence has given you. Your time of universal recognition will come.

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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

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The three great classes of symbols which I propose to consider, appeal to three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s restlessness, which only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the craving which makes him a pilgrim and wanderer. It is the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a “better country”; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Syon. The next is that craving of heart for heart, of the soul for its perfect mate, which makes him a lover. The third is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic, and in the last resort a saint.

Tags: asceticism x | love x | perfection x | pilgrimage x | purity x | restlessness x | sanctity x | wandering x | yearning x |

It was the easiest thing possible to bridge with a well-timed whisky-and-soda the gulf between non-acquaintance and warm friendship.

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In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Tags: humor x | mississippi x |

Alas, how love can trifle with itself!

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It is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable.

Tags: eucharist x |

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Tags: books x | libraries x |

His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it-and rather successfully.

Tags: freedom x | mccarthyism x |

The Second Vatican Council has no less authority and in certain respects is even more important than that of Nicea.

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As earth’s pageant passes by,
Let reflection turn thine eye
Inward, and observe thy breast;
There alone dwells solid rest.

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No man should see how laws or sausages are made.

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The first language of God is silence.

Tags: God x | language x | silence x |

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

Tags: government x |

That the supreme god of Plato’s cosmos should wear the mask of a manual worker is a triumph of the philosophical imagination over ingrained social prejudice. ... But this divine mechanic is not a drudge. He is an artist or, more precisely, what an artist would have to be in Plato’s conception of art: not the inventor of new form, but the imposer of pre-existing form on as yet formless material.

Tags: God x | art x | creation x | greek philosophy x | techne x | work x | workers x |

[The Demiurge] began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This, of course, is what we call “time.”

Tags: creation x | greek philosophy x | techne x | time x |

We are faced with two critical challenges: to engage the world around us and to embrace the contemplative within.

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[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

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[People] will tell you that they want a toaster in their car, when what they really mean is that they don’t have time to make breakfast in the morning.

Tags: miscommunication x | product development x |

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

Tags: growing x |

May the love for my art actuate me at all times; may neither avarice, nor miserliness, nor the thirst for glory or a great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of Truth could easily deceive me and make me forgetful of my lofty aim in doing good ... When wiser people teach me, let me be humble to learn; for the mind of man is limited, while the practice of the art ... is vast. May I have the strength, time, and opportunity always to verify and correct what I have learned and to increase my understanding. May I always be able to discover today the errors of yesterday, and to obtain a new light tomorrow on what I think I am sure of today.

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There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

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So we made our own computer out of macaroni pieces
And it did our thinking while we lived our lives
It counted up our feelings and divided them up even
And it called that calculation perfect love.
Didn't even know that love was bigger
Didn't even know that love was so.

Tags: automation x | computers x | love x | technology x |

The chasm between being alone and loneliness is deep. The way you begin to be alone and at peace without being lonely is to know that you are with your best friend. When you are at peace with yourself and love yourself, you can never be lonely. Only when one learns to love himself can he love another. You must find that love for yourself before you can touch the purity of aloneness. Love of self, without being selfish, will not allow loneliness to exist. Love of self also creates a love for everything else and brings us closer to the sacred oneness.

Tags: being alone x | friendship x | loneliness x | love of self x |

Be conservative in what you emit and liberal in what you accept.

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I and Pangur Bán, my cat
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

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Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.

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The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad.

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We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

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I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

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Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

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Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Tags: Life x |

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

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The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

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Fair goes the dancing when the Sitar is tuned. The string too tight breaks, and the music dies. The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies. Tune us the Sitar neither low nor high. And we will dance away the hearts of men.

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Like an archer, an arrow,
the wise man steadies his trembling mind,
a fickle and restless weapon.

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To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.

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The City orbits around eight million centers of the Universe.
And turns around the golden clock at the still point of this place.
Lift up your eyes from the moving hive and you will see time circling under a vault of stars and know just when and where you are.

Tags: Grand Central Station x | New York City x | clocks x |

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not but rather find strength in what remains behind.

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Every cloud engenders not a storm.

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A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.

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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

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It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

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Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

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If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

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We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

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Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

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Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

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I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

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You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...

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It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Tags: abilities x | freedom x |

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Tags: friendship x | love x | marriage x |

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

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Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

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"Aah... yes, And how does madam wish to pay?" She slapped her credit card on the counter. "Eventually."

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The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Tags: language x |

Ships are safe in harbor, but they were never meant to stay there.

-Unknown

Tags: courage x |

No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

Tags: humor x |

The only people for me are the mad ones -- the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow Roman candles.

Tags:

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York.

Tags: gatsby x | long island x | new york x |