Treasury
of
Famous and Interesting Quotes
Collected
by
Bobby Matherne

Assorted Quotations [ Note: Dates updated August 11, 2000, so anyone shown alive was alive on this date per: Who's Alive and Who's Dead ] Click for Famous Quips such as this:


He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister)

Also other categories of quotes:

Quotes from Resumes, Cover Letters, and Appraisals like this one: "I procrastinate, especially when the task is unpleasant."

Quotes from actual doctors reports, like this one:

While acquainting myself with a new elderly patient, I asked, "How long have you been bedridden?" After a look of complete confusion she answered... "Why, not for about twenty years — when my husband was alive."
Dr. Steven Swanson, Corvallis, OR

Quotes from Well-known Sports Figures such as this one:

I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes.
Senior basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882) in Journal May 1849

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than the stories and people we're quoting.
John Green in Celebrity Cipher feature of New Orleans Advocate, November 8, 2013

Elders of excellence. Saging instead of aging.
Louise Hay, Author of "Heal Your Life"

A little alliteration helps a lovely, little oration.
— J. David Knepper (6/20/2008)

Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.
— Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881, British Statesman, Prime Minister

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead ( 20th-century American Anthropologist ) US writer

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a Congress.
— John Adams (Second American President) US writer

A gaffe in Washington, D. C. is when you inadvertently tell the truth.
— Chris Wallace, Commentator on FOX NEWS

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle
— Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister/Writer/Painter)

The best argument against a democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter
— Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister/Writer/Painter)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
— Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister/Writer/Painter)

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
— G. Gordon Liddy (American Writer)

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
— James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
— Douglas Casey

Art must recreate, in full consciousness, and by means of signs, the total life of the universe, that is to say, the soul where the varied dream we call the universe is played.
Teodor de Wyzewa (1886)

Man does not have a nature, but a history. Man is no thing, but a drama. His life is something that has to be chosen, made up as he goes along, and a human consists in that choice and invention. Each human being is the novelist of himself, and though he may choose between being an original writer and a plagiarist, he cannot escape choosing. . . . He is condemned to be free.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
— Will Rogers

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
— Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
— Thomas Jefferson (Third American President )

I learn by going where I have to go.
— Theodore Roethke

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
— Edmund Burke, Irish born English Statesman and Author

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.
— Edmund Burke, Irish born English Statesman and Author

Re-examine all you have been told...
Dismiss what insults your Soul.
— Walt Whitman (American Poet)

Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right
Lawrence Auster

A government can be compared to our lungs. Our lungs are best when we don't realize they are helping us breathe. It is when we are constantly aware of our lungs that we know they have come down with an illness.
Lao-Tzu

Principle — particularly moral principle — can never be a weathervane, spinning around this way and that with the shifting winds of expediency. Moral principle is a compass forever fixed and forever true.
Edward Lyman

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

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Samuel Johnson

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.
Ken Wilber (Webpage )

There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
Swedish saying

The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
Plutarch

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news ... who proclaims salvation.
Isaiah 52:7

No. That's like asking two mountain peaks to merge.
King of Masks
(Title character's answer when asked if he would be consider becoming partners with another performer. From movie "The King of Mask" 1999)

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
— Voltaire

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Following quotes came to me from PK Scheerle, 2012 newsletter :

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
— Antony Jay

We intersect each other's lives for a purpose, and we bear gifts for one another.
— Julia Cameron

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise man grows it under his feet
— James Oppenheim

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic.
— Wolfgang von Goethe

Every memorable act is the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm.
— Og Mandino

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.
Fulton Oursler, American Journalist and Author (1893-1952)

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.
— Corrie ten Boom

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which many men throw away.
— Charles Caleb Colton

The height of cleverness is being able to conceal it.
— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

To love one's friend, have an attitude of gratitude, and do work, is the sum of an ideal life.
— Elbert Hubbard

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
END Scheerle quotes

I am easily satisfied with the very best.
— Winston Churchill

There should be a tax on every man that wanted to get a government appointment, or be elected to office. In two years that tax alone would pay our national debt.
— Will Rogers

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The city is a paradise of trifles.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

O day of days, when we can read! The reader and the book. Either without the other is naught.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Aristo said, that neither a bath nor a lecture did signify any thing unless they scored & made men clean."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know the spirit, — by its victorious tone.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The avaricious man seeks to add to the number of his toys, the scientific man to find new relations.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Napoleon was the farmer who wished for all the land that joined his own.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great deal that is not set down in the bill. I pay the Schoolmaster, but 'tis the school-boys that educate my son
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every court the judge is on trial as well as the culprit.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)

Matter is the frail and weary weed in which God has dressed the soul which he has called into time.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (June 16, 1836 in his Journal)

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

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; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)

Always the man of genius dwells alone, and like the mountain pays the tax of snows and silence for elevation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Journal April 10, 1837

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


            I am not earth-born, though I here delay;
            Hope's child, I summon infinite powers,
            And laugh to see the mild and sunny clay
            Smile on the shrunk and thin autumnal hours;
            I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me,
            If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea.

                  Ellery Channing,
                  friend of Thoreau and Emerson, 1843, "A Poet's Hope"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

God gave us memories so that we may have roses in December.
James M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)

Think me not unkind and rude
that I walk alone in grove and glen
I go to the God of the wood
to fetch His word to men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

The craft of the merchant is this: bringing a thing from where it abounds to where it is costly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
Henry David Thoreau from Walden

They copied all they could copy, but they couldn't copy my mind, so I left them copying merrily, a year and a half behind.
Rudyard Kipling ( English Writer and Poet, 1865 - 1936 )

If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart

Be like the bird that pausing in her flight a while, on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her — and yet sings, knowing that she has wings.
Victor Hugo (French poet, dramatist, and writer)

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
— George Santayana 1863-1952, American Writer)

A fanatic is one who re-doubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.
George Santayana (1863-1952, American Writer)

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
— Emily Dickinson (Belle of Amherst, American Poet)

People constantly speak of ‘the government’ doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

Of the Gettysburg Address: it was not the Union forces that were fighting for government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but the people of the southern states.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (American Writer)

Always give without remembering,
       always receive without forgetting.
Nino Qubein (Author)

When the gods want to punish you they answer your prayers.
Isak Dinesen in her novel, "Out of Africa" (Author)

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
Ernest Hemingway (American Writer)

For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.
Short Story in 6 words, written by Ernest Hemingway (From 2016 movie: "Papa: Hemingway in Cuba")

As you stroll around the garden of The Poynter Institute, several inspirational sayings, carved into marble, greet you. One comes from the great sports writer Red Smith: "Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
Roy Peter Clark (American Writer)

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people once a year.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
Brendan Gill (1914-1997) US writer

What frenzy has of late posssess'd the brain
Though few can write, yet fewer can refrain."
Samuel Garth ( 17th-century physician and poet ) US writer

Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
— Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo (French poet, dramatist, and writer)

And I'll tell you something else — people are people, whatever their walk of life!
Gordon Lish (Avant garde novelist)

Don't talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
— Joseph Conrad , from his Autobiography.

Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic truths.
— Joseph Conrad , from his Autobiography.

Good manners make any man a pleasure to be with. Ask any woman.
— Peter Mayle

The virtuous need but few laws; for it is not the law which determines their actions, but their actions which determine the law.
— Theophrastus

These days, liberals are once again preaching one thing and practicing another. They always want diversity, but that ideal never seems to carry over to diversity of opinion.
— Vanessa Pierce

A liberal is a man who will give away everything he doesn’t own.
—Frank Dane

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
— Henry David Thoreau

Any wild mushroom can be eaten; some more than once.
Kaisu Viikari (MD, PhD Ophthalmology, Turku, Finland)

Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident.
— Walter Goodman

There are so many congressmen and senators here [in Washington, D.C.], I don't know whether to tell a joke or pass a bill...as if there was a difference.
— Bob Hope

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents....
James Madison (4^th American President)

If pro is opposite of con,then what is the opposite of progress?

Congress!
— Written in the Men's restroom in the Representatives House of Congress, Washington, DC

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
Richard Feynman (American Nobel Physicist and Author)

The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character.
Sir Arthur Helps

A yawn may be bad manners but it's an honest opinion.
Evan Esar

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.
François duc de la Rochefoucauld

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities — always see them, for they're always there.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

RJM NOTE: Inspired by Peale, Robert H. Schuller became a possibilitarian and developed Possibility Thinking into a way of life for himself, his family, his Garden Community Church members in California, and the viewers of his Hour of Power weekly telecasts all over the world.

On Christ the solid rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
Robert H. Schuller [Minister and Founder of Garden Grove Community Church and Hour of Power]

Tough times never last; tough people do.
Robert A. Schuller

Prayer does not change things; prayer changes us for things.
Robert A. Schuller

When you're down to nothing, God is up to something!
Robert A. Schuller

When swimming in a sewer the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut.
Harry Boyd, TA Therapist from Oklahoma during a group session, c. 1977.

You can't make people better off by taking options away from them.
Thomas Sowell, American Writer

There is no bad weather, only bad clothes.
Old Swedish Saying

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
— Leonardo Da Vinci

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
Sam Rayburn

Any fool can find his way, a poet alone knows how to lose it.
Stuart Gilbert

A poem is special because its logic is emotional and aesthetic and resists the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself.
Dorothea Lasky (in July/August 2014 Poetry Magazine Issue)

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Louis L'Amour

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
Mark Twain

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
Mark Twain

If you don't read the newspaper (or watch TV news) you are uninformed,
if you do read the newspaper (or watch TV news) you are misinformed.
Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress....
But then I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.
— Albert Jay Nock

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton Early 20th Century Writer (equally true about TV and Internet invented after G. K. Chesterton)

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

English experience indicates that when two political parties agree about something, it is generally wrong.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton [Writer]

Death is like the blowing out of a candle at the break of dawn.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

Life is what happens when you're making other plans.
Anonymous

One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.
Anonymous

Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to merge his car onto a crowded freeway.
Anonymous

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them — every day begin the task anew.
St Francis de Sales [My patron saint — Bobby Matherne]

Healing States are idiopathic, i.e., arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause — that cause obscured because it happened while the hippocampus was unable to transfer cognitive (declarative) memory to the cortex which is the storehouse from which we extract causes. A Speed Trace will recover the unknown and obscure cause by converting doylic memories (pre-hippocampal memories) into cognitive memories via a now-working hippocampus.
Bobby Matherne (March 2, 2013) (21st-century Writer)

The Earth is a eurytopic planet, i. e., tolerant of wide variation in one or more environmental factors.
— Bobby Matherne

What is a squirrel but a rat with a fancy tail?
— Bobby Matherne (August 6, 2017, 21st-century Writer)

In the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, it occurs to me that Wisdom is to Life as oil is to a lamp: it casts Light. Knowledge only casts data into the Dark — Wisdom casts Light and chases the Dark away.
Bobby Matherne

What is Eurythmy? We write a poem and we feel its effect inside of us, that is Intuition at work. Then we recite the poem and Inspiration is at work inside of us. If you then allow the poem to settle into you and express itself as movement, you have Imagination at work inside you and its effect is visible as eurythmy to others.
— Bobby Matherne

Gestalt is about getting livened up, about re-owning your power, which is important in a world of rules and expectations which strive to take away our power.
— Bobby Matherne, written March 21, 2012 in Don't Push the River.

An unanswerable question is an unanswered question that people have given up on.
— Bobby Matherne, written April 28, 2015.

Life would be impossible in the physical world were not future events to be preceded by hope in this rhythmical way. Would anyone make a table today without being sure it would not be destroyed in the night; would anyone sow seeds if he had no idea what would become of them?
— Rudolf Steiner in Faith, Love, Hope

The above quotation prompts me to wonder: "Would God make human beings if our souls were destroyed in the night by death?" If there's hope for the flowers, there's certainly hope for human beings.
— Bobby Matherne

There are no coincidences — only blessings from God.
— Bobby Matherne

Reality is always stranger than fiction because fiction lives inside of reality.
— Bobby Matherne

A platitude is a high form of mediocrity.
— Bobby Matherne

A dove that does not alight like a dove is an angel.
An angel does not alight with a touch — an angel alights with a feeling.
— Bobby Matherne

Love is the ultimate ulterior motive.
— Bobby Matherne

"You're full of it today, Bobby, full of creative energy," Kathy Nichols.
"My mother used to call it meanness — what did she know?"
— Bobby Matherne

I have too fond memories of drinking beer to spoil them by a hangover in the present.
— Bobby Matherne

You can lose yourself in a book, but you find yourself in Poetry.
Jasper Fforde in First Among Sequels

Grace Before Meals by Bobby Matherne:

Through the Blessings of Christ, Who Refreshes our Soul,
May this Food from His Bounty Refresh our Body.

Toasts by Bobby Matherne:

May all those who have graced our presence,
Join us now to taste this essence.

May this drink we dream we swallow
make us dream of all to follow.

May for every drop this glass conveys,
A day be added to your days!

The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
Duguet

When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.
— Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (spoken in 1993)

Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H.L. Mencken

Any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day.
Booker T. Washington [American Educator and Philosopher]

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippman [American Commentator]

All songs are living ghosts that long for a living voice.
Brendan Kinneally

It is a funny thing about life — if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
W. Somerset Maugham

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

The path to salvation is as narrow and hard to walk as on a razor’s edge.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

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

Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking.
J. C. Watts, Jr.

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals — that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
Honore De Balzac

When politicians rush to fix things, it's a sure sign that either the intended patient is dead or fully healed.
Tony Snow (News Commentator, 2002)

The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him/her. They come to us not knowing that cure. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.
Albert Schweitzer, MD

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Rollin Becker had a 'mantra' he'd use before he saw a patient: 'Thank you for allowing me to watch you heal yourself.'
Hilmar Moore, Ortho-Bionomy Worker

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.
George Eliot [Novelist]

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. .
Christopher Reeve[Superman]

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop[Noted Fables Author]

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
Max Lerner

Time is the money of love.
Oscar Kokoschka, famous impressionist, painter of "Bride of the Wind", a portrait of Alma Mahler.

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack.
Winston Churchill [British WWII Prime Minister ]

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Paul Valery

A state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation.
Edmund Burke

The enemies of truth are always awfully nice.
Christopher Morely

If I knew that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Thoreau

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
Oscar Wilde

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
— T.S. Eliot

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
— Jonathan Swift

"I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
— Gene Fowler

I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
— William Hazlitt

Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper.
— Robert E. Lee

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
— Alexis de Tocqueville

Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and (RJM: so-called) governments destroy freedom.
— Michael Ellner

Consensus is the negation of leadership.
— Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of England, in 1980s)

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solution.
— Edward R. Murrow (Radio and TV News Correspondant, Mid 20th Century)

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.
— Alexander Hamilton

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the ‘U.S. surface air temperature’ rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed. Then again, you might not. They’re not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The ‘hottest year on record’ is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century—2000, 2002, 2003, 2004—plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it. And yet we survived.
— Mark Steyn

Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

We need more Democrats in the Senate — like Custer needed more arrows.
Ronald Reagan [40th United States president, 1980-88] “People constantly speak of ‘the government’ doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men.” —H. L. Mencken “Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

You know it’s said that an economist is the only professional who sees something working in practice and then seriously wonders if it works in theory.
Ronald Reagan [40th United States president, 1980-88]

Reducing America to the status of a second class nation, unable to make its voice heard in the councils of the world will surely be the prelude to another generation of Americans dying needlessly because of our mistakes.
Ronald Reagan [40th United States president, 1980-88]

We stand here on the only island of freedom that is left in the whole world. There is no place left to flee to ... no place to escape to. We defend freedom here or it is gone. There is no place for us to run, only to make a stand. And if we fail, I think we face telling our children, and our children's children, what it was we found more precious than freedom. Because I am sure someday — if we fail in this — there will be a generation that will ask.
I think the so-called conservative is today what was, in the classic sense, the liberal. The classical liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the conservative.

Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation's Capital just beyond, the graves of America's military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these graves ourselves — with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America's own have ever served and sacrificed. ... Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up, fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its destruction. We know, as have our Nation's defenders down through the years, that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty, justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead, let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country's own.
Ronald Reagan

To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
— Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

In the fourth century, a monk thought he heard God telling him to go to Rome... He followed a crowd into the Colosseum and saw the gladiators. He realized they were going to fight to the death. He cried out, 'In the Name of Christ, stop!'... made his way through the crowd and climbed the wall into the arena... As he was pleading with the gladiators... one of them plunged his sword into his body... his last words were, 'In the Name of Christ, stop!' Suddenly the gladiators stood looking at this tiny form... In dead silence, everyone left. That was the last battle in the Colosseum. One tiny voice... 'In the Name of Christ, stop!' We could be saying that today.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

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 [US President 1980-88]

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

Here's my strategy on the Cold War:
       We win, they lose.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with. Well, we've discovered that money alone isn't the answer.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

I know what it's like to pull the Republican lever for the first time, because I used to be a Democrat myself and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute and then it feels just great.
Ronald Reagan [US President 1980-88]

A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands — even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
John Stuart Mill (1806 to 1873, English philosopher and reformer)

Hatred turns 90% of people into monsters and 10% into saints.
Christopher Tidmore (Louisiana Weekly columnist)

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. ... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, 'This was their finest hour'.
Winston Churchill (English PM, author, statesman)

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop every now and then and look around, you could miss it.
Ferris Beuler (Written by John Hughes in the screenplay for the 1980s movie Ferris Beuler's Day Off . Fictional character Ferris Beuler was played by Matthew Broderick.)

I live by this credo: Have a little laugh at life and look around you for happiness instead of sadness. Laughter has always brought me out of unhappy situations. Even in your darkest moment, you usually can find something to laugh about if you try hard enough.
— Red Skelton - 1913-1997

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde [Playwright]

The only difference between caprice and a lifelong passion is that caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde [Playwright]

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
Oscar Wilde [Playwright]

Everyone should know that you can’t live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.
Apuleius [Ancient Roman writer ]

It is never too early or too late to care for the well-being of the soul.
Epicurus [Ancient Roman writer ]

Books are like mountaintops jutting out of the sea. Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local and, for all that, a part of a universal pattern. And so, while they inevitably reflect a time and place, they are part of a more general intellectual geography.
Jerome Bruner [American Educator and Scholar ]

Life is what happens when we are making other plans.
Anonymous

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
John Keats

History is simply the a record of things which ought not to have happened.
I. A. Richards [British Literary Critic]

You can observe a lot by watching.
Yogi Berra [Brooklyn Dodger's Catcher and Major League Philosopher]

I've had a wonderful evening, but it wasn't here tonight.
Groucho Marx (To a hostess upon leaving a party)

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
Groucho Marx (Comedian aka Captain Spalding)

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx (Comedian aka Captain Spalding)

Joan Rivers Quotes from Esquire Magazine here: http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/joanrivers0507

Don't expect praise without envy — until you're dead.
Joan Rivers (Comedienne, 1933-2014)

Tell a joke to a comedian and he won't laugh. He'll point at you and say, "That's funny."
Joan Rivers (Comedienne, 1933-2014)

They always say how mean I am. But let me tell you, the smart ones get it. When I took out the jokes about Cher, she said, "Why am I not in your act anymore?"
Joan Rivers (Comedienne, 1933-2014)

My last words? They might be, "But it was a joke. Put down the gun! It was a joke! Arrgh!"
Joan Rivers (Comedienne, 1933-2014)

Men look great when they're a little used. They've done it, and they know about it. That's William Holden to me. Robert Mitchum. George Clooney is getting that look. That wonderful, wonderful lived-in look.
Joan Rivers (Comedienne, 1933-2014)

Nonetheless, as often happens with lonely young creatures, I found companionship. In poetry. Indeed, I wonder whether poetry would have any readers besides poets if love combined with loneliness did not perform the introductions.
Mary McCarthy [American writer, from How I Grew, page 72]

The mind's time is quicker than the tongue's.
Mary McCarthy [American writer from The Company She Keeps, page 280]

"As for the wealthy business owner and whether he 'needs' the extra dollars, I'll simply relate the old adage of the man who said 'I've never had my paycheck signed by a poor man'."
Ron Paul (U. S. Representative from Texas, 2003)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (Philosopher)

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)

“Fools get away with the impossible,” Robert Mitchum. “That’s because they’re the only ones who try it,” Jane Russell
in “His Kind of Woman” (1951 B&W movie)

Success is a poison that should be only taken late in life, then only in small doses.
Anthony Trollope (British Writer)

Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious.
Cyril Connolly

Once you’ve got hold of an idea, the proofs of it tend to proliferate.
Margaret Atwood (Canadian writer)

People don't want to grow old, but they do grow old by repeating themselves.
Paul Weitz, movie director of 2002 movie with Hugh Grant, About a Boy

God is in the details.
Mies van der Rohe (20th Century Architect)

Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.
James Garfield

If there is one thing upon this earth that mankind love and admire better than another, it is a brave man — it is the man who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil.
— James A. Garfield

A man who never has gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he may steal from the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt

Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.
Wallace Stevens

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
Blaize Pascal

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaize Pascal

Comedy is the collision of two different contexts, science is their fusion and art is their juxtaposition.
Arthur Koestler, (paraphrased)

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Sir William Osler

The shaman and scientist do not speak the language, but they are nonetheless engaged in the same activity: interpreting experience by means of theoretical constructs.
Gary Brent Madison

The Theorist's Fallacy is the confusion of a method or doctrine with the very reality it is about.
Gary Brent Madison

Put me clearly on the record: I don't want to 'reform' Social Security or 'rescue' it or 'adjust it to the new realities of the 21st century.' No, I want to hit it in the head with a shovel and bury it in a New Jersey landfill. It is time to kill the rotten, lousy, 'rip off your kids to keep granny in bingo cards' Ponzi scheme that we call Social Security, but would be more accurately described as 'the government taking money from poor, hard-working young families and giving just enough of it to retirees to keep them broke, too'.
Michael Graham

For a product to surprise me, it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.
? Paul Graham (English Computer Programmer and Writer)

...effective censorship is a contradiction in terms. Like pruning, it gives new vigor to what it cuts back; but if it attacks the root, it destroys the plant it is supposed to save.

If modern art is sometimes shrill, it is not the fault of the artist alone. We all tend to raise our voices when we speak to persons who are getting deaf.

As Croce rather brusquely put it, there is no 'double bottom' to the suitcase of art.

Edgar Wind (3 quotes above from his book, Art and Anarchy )

Good writing is like a window pane.
George Orwell (Author, "1984")

Writing is easy — it's having something worth writing about that is hard.
Bobby Matherne (American Writer)

Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith (Sports Writer)

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler (Reporter)

Why should I get writer's block? My father never got truck driver's block.
Roger Simon (Newspaper Columnist)

What we observe is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Werner Heisenberg (Physicist)

The teacher has forgotten and the students will soon forget, that what they see conveys no information until they know beforehand what they are expected to see.
Peter Medawar (Philosopher)

We need a ladder to the mind. A ladder and rungs.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 ) Click here to read more Joubert quotes.

Our life is of woven wind.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Our eye prevents us from seeing: it is our body that prevents us from touching. Between us and the truth there are our senses, which introduce a part of the truth in us and which also separate us from it.
— Joseph Joubert (1754 - 1821), from his Notebook

Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Newton. It is no more true that he has discovered the system of the world than it is true that someone who balances the accounts of an administration has discovered a system of government.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Newton. How ripe his apple was.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Roundness. This shape guarantees matter a long life. Time does not know where to take hold of it.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Like pebbles on a beach,
We are rounded by every wave
by every life
by every lifetime
Until time does not know where to take hold of us from now on.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
P.J. O'Rourke

The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money
Bernard Meltzer

There's no better way to overcome a trickle of doubt than with a flood of naked truth.
from NetFlix's 'House of Cards' Series

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
Phillips Brooks

Nimbleness. Agility of mind. These works are no more than perilous leaps into space.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Skeptics are people who are absolutely sure that people can never be sure of anything.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Only the clever can experience tragedy; others merely stumble into accidents.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Joseph Joubert had a certain agility of mind.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Why is it we prohibit people from killing old growth trees and do not prohibit them from killing new growth human babies?
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

The way the Buddhist asks the question creates a different view of nature than the way the physicist does. The Buddhist asks wave questions and the physicist asks particle questions. One sees an unbroken whole and the other sees scattered parts.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

A hug is a heart to heart talk.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Our arms are canes of flesh with which the soul reaches and touches.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

When we hug, our souls mesh.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Who touches my books touches me.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

My words are but poor company to the ideas within.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Let your ink grow ripe.
Joseph Joubert (French writer, 1754 - 1824 )

Let your ink grow ripe and your books will write themselves.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

If I vanish from your view, it is because I travel with another.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Words. Magic utterances by which we enthrall one another in everyday trances.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Dreams have wings,
And other things
That smile like butterflies.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Rightly understood, psychotherapy is a process of breaking spells — spells of limitation that have held one in thrall, up until now.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

The best advice about anticipatory loss came from Richard Bandler when he said, “You have to plan ahead to be disappointed.”
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

Darwin's crew on their famous voyage, when they encountered South Sea Islanders that had never seen a boat bigger than an outrigger canoe, asked the natives what they thought about their large ship. The natives looked directly at the ship and said, "What ship? That's just a funny looking seabird on the water!"
Bobby Matherne (American writer)

I failed in what I set out to do
At the same time as I succeeded
in what I did not even suspect
I was about to do.
Bobby Matherne (American writer, 1940 - )

No use regretting things which have gone through the trouble of happening. and Stepping out of the anteroom of eternity.
Spoken by characters in this movie Dean Spangly)

In the queer mess of human destiny the determining factor is Luck. For every important place in life there are many men of fairly equal capacities. Among them Luck divides who shall accomplish the great work, who shall be crowned with laurel, and who shall fall back in obscurity and silence.
William Woodward (from Shameless Exploitation)

The anthropic principle asserts that the universe is the way it is because of the way we are.
Edward Harrison

Those who live in seclusion in mountains and forests and think that they are thus better than others cannot even attain happiness, let alone Buddhahood.
Muso Kokushi

"Be good and you will be happy" is a dangerous inversion. "Be happy and you will be good" is the truth.
W. H. Auden

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
Will Durant [Historian]

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of chemistry and physics.
Francis Crick

People only pay attention to things they discover for themselves.
Tony Perkins in the movie "Pretty Poison"

There are few secrets which do not cover a wrong, perhaps none which does not involve a lie.
George Perkins Marsh (1801- 1882 American Diplomatist and Philologist, born in Woodstock, Vermont)

Sidney Cox Said in his book, Indirections, reviewed at: http://www.doyletics.com/_arj1/indirect.htm

When you have made a reader wonder until a new realization comes to him, you have done what you started out to do.

On Frost: What he does is start people's imaginations so that they can better discover and enjoy their own actual experiences when no poet is by to provide the imagination.

Your reader has to be assured that he is on familiar ground. The more so, the more daring your intention.

To take the vapor threads of possibility that run up from the earth to heaven and weave them with the warp of days.

He is fortunate if the discrepancy between dream and possibility also deepens his sense of humor.

... history is always going to the bow-wows but never does.

... learn to ride the flux, and shape it a little as it flows to your fluent but positive intent. Doing so you will have your times of loving the dangerous flood you ride and guide.

For sharing and possessing large intentions makes one either pompous, self-pitying, or humorous. Some of us show traces of all three.

You may have always known that the most stable things in a flood is a man or woman who can ride it.

... a person's point of view is where he looks from.

Let no one shame you with characteristics natural to your age.

If you want to write well, you let a subject make you its subject.

Ford Maddox Ford, '...style, a succession of small surprises. You didn't contrive to put them there. Your style is your surprise.'

We need yardsticks... but yardsticks will not measure manifold motion.
Sidney Cox (1889-1952)

" 'If I've offended you, I'm sorry' is not a real apology, but I will accept it in the sense in which it is intended."
Bobby Matherne (American writer, who on his 62^nd birthday, July 20, 2002, said this in reply to someone who said, 'If I've offended you, I'm sorry.')

Most people grow old like bread does: they grow stale. One can only stay young by re-inventing oneself!
Bobby Matherne (American writer)

It is one of the joys of publishing as I do directly to the Internet that I can have my cake and eat it, too, that is, I can publish it and continue to edit it. Directly I publish a review, an essay, or a newsletter to the Internet, I hear the cries arise from the text for emendation, for improvement, for parsing, for clarification — they beckon me to give them attention like a houseful of children newly arrived home from school. I must attend them — attend each paragraph, each sentence, each word, and allow them to reveal to me how the meaning they hold matches my intent when I first set them carefully into place. When, as sometimes happens, I read my words after a rest period and am puzzled as to my original intent, I must first recover my intent, sacrifice my prose with a flourish of the delete key, and reform my intent into words with more clarity. Then I can immediately dispatch my newly rewritten sentences into publication over the Internet.
— Bobby Matherne in Thoreau's Journal No. 6.

Some people spend their entire life perfecting their faults.
Anonymous

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Horton Cooley

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Muhammad Ali (né Cassius Clay, changed name about 21, American Boxing Champ)

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius

This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.
Theodore Roosevelt

Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.
Herbert Hoover

A world that views itself the same at 5,000 years old as it did at 2,000 years old has wasted 3,000 years of life.
Bobby Matherne (paraphrase of Ali's statement above: at a world level, it describes the effect of ignoring the evolution of consciousness over a time span of 3,000 years.)

Think like a man of action; act like a man of thought.
Henri Bergson

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise man in the storm prays to God not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

The kingdom of thought is a proud aristocracy.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), in his 1823 Journal

A nation like a tree does not thrive till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), in his 1823 Journal

Man is a foolish slave who is busy in forging his own fetters.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), in his 1823 Journal

NOTE: The following quote appeared on a birthday card to me from Kathryn Yost. The next day a motivational speaker, Les Brown, used the same quote and attributed it to Henry David Thoreau. This will set the record straight. While Thoreau clearly followed his mentor's dictum for his entire life (See his Journals, he did not originate it.

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who come from the best family.
Blaise Pascal [French philosopher]

If arrogance were a crime, there wouldn't be enough jail cells in the entire United States to hold all the people in TV news.
Bernard Goldberg (writing in "Bias")

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
— Anais Nin, American Author (1903-1977)

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
— Anais Nin, American Author (1903-1977)

The infinite wistfulness
        of the infinitive.
To know her
        is to love her.
To walk and
        chew gum.
To pass through the eye of a needle
        and enter heaven.
Michael Hoffman, writing in the London Review of Books, 7 February 2002

When I was born, death kissed me. I kissed it back.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The place we rip open again and again that always heals — that’s God.
Rainer Maria Rilke in Sonnets to Orpheus

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Barry Goldwater [US Senator, 20th Century]

We’re all entitled to our own opinions; we’re not all entitled to our own facts.
Phil Gram [Senator from Texas in the Senate, Thursday September 26, 2002]

In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—Andre Gide

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Thomas Carlyle [British Author]

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas Carlyle [British Author]

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle [British Author]

Science is to reality as a large stone in hot water is to minestrone.
Bobby Matherne (American writer)

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.
Joe Theisman [ NFL quarterback]

No good deed goes unpunished.
Clare Booth Luce [American writer]

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
Carl Zwanzig

I'm proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.
Arthur Godfrey (American entertainer)

I pay my taxes gladly, but not willingly. I'd pay willingly and gladly if I were able to choose how the money was spent, instead of politicians choosing for me.
Bobby Matherne (American freedom builder)

Learning to be a writer is a do-it-yourself project.
Bobby Matherne (American writer)

Integrity has no need of rules. Albert Camus (French Author)

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.... The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
General Omar Bradley [WWII USA General]

Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator)

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator c. 1892, from eulogy to his brother, Ebon)

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars — an intellectual ocean — toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator)

We go as far as we can, and the rest of the way we say — God.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator)

A life should not be written until it has been lived.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator)

The laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator 1833-1899)

It can be said of Ingersoll, as was written of Castelar, that his eloquent utterances are as the finely-fashioned ornamental designs on a Damascus blade — the blade cuts as keenly, and the embellishments beautify without retarding its power.
The Capital (a leading journal in Washington)

Democrats will trample over a thousand poor people to throw a rock at a rich man.
Tom Adkins of "The Common Conservative"

That which is above is like that which is below, to perpetuate the mystery of the One Thing.
Hermes Trismegistus [Egyptian, compiler of ancient Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, and Gnostic writings, and originator of the dictum, "As Above, So Below"]

We seem not to have learned a basic lesson of history: Capitalism harnesses human self interest; socialism exhausts itself trying to kill it.
Linda Bowles [American Writer]

How did people respond to our (research) findings? By defending their own paradigms. In response to new knowledge, there is always the question of how to maintain oneself doing the things one was trained in.
Salvador Minuchin [Innovator in Family Therapy]

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;
       Therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
       Therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
       Therefore we must be saved by love.
Reinhold Niebuhr [Theologian 1892 - 1971]

Language, like light, is a medium: and the true philosophic style, like light from a north window, exhibits objects clearly, and distinctly, without soliciting attention to itself.
William Gilpin [British Author 1724-1804]

The art of teaching is to make the enjoyed moment serve the whole of life.
A. C. Harwood [Author]

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul.
Henry Ward Beecher [American Writer 1813-1887]

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.
Henry Ward Beecher [American Writer 1813-1887]

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself — and be lenient to everybody else.
Henry Ward Beecher [American Writer 1813-1887, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe]

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
Helen Keller (American Author, 1880-1968, became blind & deaf at 19 months old)

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.
— Kenneth Boulding

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
—Walter Lippmann

He is able
Who thinks he is able.
Buddha

Once I remarked to Feynman that I was impressed by Hawking's ability to do path integrals in his head, "Ahh, that isn't so great," Feynman responded. "It is much more interesting to invent the path integral approach as I did as opposed to just being able to do the mechanics of it in your head." Feynman, wasn't being immodest, he was right, and this example (although not in Gleick's book) illustrates a point Gleick successfully presents throughout the book, that Feynman's genius and the nature of genius rests in creativity and originality. This was what the core of Feynman's tremendous intellect was all about - creating and discovering ideas. Indeed, Feynman's motto throughout his career, and found circled on his blackboard at the time of his death was "What I can not create, I can not understand."
Al Seckel (Reviewer of James Gleick’s book, “Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman” for the Santa Monica News, 1992)

Preach always. If necessary, use words.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)

The paper, the ink, the cover – what John Updike called ‘the charming little clothy box of the thing’ – this is not something e-book makers care about. They dismiss such observations with the buzz phrase ‘books as furniture.’ They admire books for technical reasons, though: books never crash.
D.T. Max The Electronic Book

Lexicographer – a harmless drudge.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1884) [First lexicographer of note, in his, the very first English dictionary]

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)[Co-author of the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense and even more.]

Let no pleasure tempt thee, no profit allure thee, no ambition corrupt thee, no example sway thee, no persuasion move thee to do anything which thou knowest to be evil; so thou shalt live jollily, for a good conscience is a continual Christmas.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [American printer, inventor, patriot, and writer]

They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [American printer, inventor, patriot, and writer]

Honour, worthily obtained, is in its nature a personal thing, and incommunicable to any but those who had some share in obtaining it.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [American printer, inventor, patriot, and writer]

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Fred Allen (American Humorist 1894 - 1956)

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. 1907
Theodore Roosevelt (Spoken by this American President in 1907)

Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness.
Robert Hutchinson (1871 - 1960)

I am writing in order to . . . locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are.
Hilary Mantel — writing in London Review of Books, 6 Feb 2003

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Alfred North Whitehead

The little word is has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therin too lies the danger. Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one another.
George Santayana

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E.B. White.

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.
Charlie Shedd

If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have told me, "a faster horse."
Henry Ford (American Industrialist, inventor of mass production of the first cheap automobile)

Man has his will, - but woman has her way.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (American Jurist and Author 1809 - 1894)

Man's mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894, American poet, essayist and physician )

Picasso said that no one is capable of understanding you who is not capable of doing the same work himself.
Gertrude Stein (American writer 1874-1946)

Your friendship is good to feel in my heart.
Yvan Béguin (Geneva, Switzerland)

I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it — unless I'm thirsty.
Mme. Lily Bollinger

Ineffable Creator, Who out of the treasures of Thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of Angels and set them in admirable order high above the heavens and hast disposed the divers portions of the universe in such marvellous array, Thou Who art called the True Source of Light and supereminent Principle of Wisdom, be pleased to cast a beam of Thy radiance upon the darkness of my mind and dispel from me the double darkness of sin and ignorance in which I have been born. Thou Who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, fashion my words and pour upon my lips the grace of Thy benediction. Grant me penetration to understand, capacity to retain, method and facility in study, subtlety in interpretation and abundant grace of expression. Order the beginning, direct the progress and perfect the achievement of my work, Thou Who art true God and true Man and livest and reignest for ever and ever. Amen.
Thomas Aquinas (13^th Century Theologian)

I passionately hate the idea of being "with it", I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Orson Welles (1915-1985, US film & stage director, actor, writer & producer who redefined film, Academy Award)

Some historical uses of the word "mind". extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary and listed by date in their order of appearance.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, of all thine heart, and in all thy soul, and in all thy mind.
(Mt 22.37, wyclif, 1382).

What thing is man, that thou art mindful of him?
(Heb 2.6, wyclif, 1382).

Do ye this thing in mind of me.
(Lk 22.19, wyclif, 1382).

It is no small engine to know all the secrets pertaining to the mind.
(1477).

A man's intent or mind spoken by his own mouth moveth more the hearer than it were showed and spoken by any other.
(1508).

Their mind abstract, not knowing what they say.
(1509).

I reason with one in a matter to feel his mind in it.
(1530).

I have a person or a beast according to my mind, I have them in such awe as I desire.
(1530).

Suspense: a hanging up; also doubt or uncertainty of mind.
(1548).

Love doth move the mind to mercy.
(1557).

Bend the powers of your spirit, and the force of your mind . . .
(1576).

Where he was very mindful of all other things, he never would remember any injurie done unto him.
(1579).

You are already love's firm votary, and cannot soon revolt, and change your mind.
(1591, shak).

What strange humor or mind-changing opinion took you this morning?
(1597).

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind; And that which governs me to go about, doth part his function, and is partly blind.
(1600, shak).

The mind doth make the fact, or good or ill.
(1605).

To be carnally minded is death.
(Rm 8.6, 1611).

Certainly, it is Heaven upon Earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
(1625, Bacon).

If we mind toward heaven, we must walk through the world as strangers.
(1633).

Our mind . . . maketh up . . . the conceivable or intelligible things out of the sensible.
(1638).

The wolf . . . sent to school to learn to spell, could make nothing of all that was said to him but sheep. His mind still ran upon that.
(1677).

The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917- ) on back side of Title page of his book, Childhood's End

Today the taxing power, rather than chattel slavery, is the instrument by which the parasitical element of the population subsists. And that element, which includes politicians, panics at the slightest reduction in the state's power to plunder. Once you start liberating taxpayers, even a little tiny bit, nobody knows where it may end.
Joseph Sobran

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.
William Harvey [17th Century Italian philosopher, in 1628]

Man will never become philosopher by worrying about the writings of other men.
Galileo [17th Century Italian philosopher]

A false Friend and a Shadow, attend only while the Sun shines.
Benjamin Franklin [American Statesman]

Humility is the foundation of all virtues.
Confucius [Chinese Philosopher]

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
Mark Twain [American Humorist]

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain [American Humorist]

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
Mark Twain [American Humorist]

Every living thing is a structure which acts to increase order within its boundaries.
J. Peter Vajk [20th Century Writer]

Wine – light held together by moisture.
Galileo [17th Century Italian philosopher]

Nemo propheta acceptus in patria sua
In English: No one is accepted as a prophet in his own country.
Suor Maria Celeste, daughter of Galileo, written in a letter to her father, October 15, 1633..

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool...shun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is willing...teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep...awaken him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise...follow him."
Chinese proverb

When you build bridges, you can keep crossing them.
Rick Pitino (19xx – ) US basketball coach

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
Socrates

Every man should have a wife. If you marry a good wife, you will be thankful. And if you marry a bad wife, you can become a philosopher.
Socrates

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
George Bernard Shaw

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valéry

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Montaigne

Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action .
Goethe

For only the personal can heal the personal, and God must become man to enable man to come to God.
Schiller from his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept.
Novalis

Nothing is more damaging to a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Francis Bacon

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James

Either you think &mash; or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you .
F. Scott Fitzgerald

All big things in this world are done by people who are naive and have an idea that is obviously impossible.
Dr. Frank Richards

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
Bertrand Russell

Then you’ll remember your life as a book of candles, each page read by the light of its own burning.
Li-Young Lee

Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
— Ambrose Bierce

Politics — n. strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
Ambrose Bierce

Brain. An apparatus with which we think we think .
Ambrose Bierce

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
— Ambrose Bierce

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
— Charles de Gaulle

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
— Otto von Bismarck

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.
— Thomas Carlyle

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it .
Pablo Picasso

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation .
Herman Melville

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
— Horace

In law, what pleas so tainted and corrupt, But being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil.
— Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!
— Andrew Jackson

Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.
--President Andrew Jackson

Necessity never made a good bargain.
Benjamin Franklin

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
— Robert Frost

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
— Robert Frost

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Reality is more profound than whatever human beings may often be willing to encompass with their thinking.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

Teachers as artists of education must approach children as artists of life.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

The only thing that matters is whether what I say can stand the test of a true knowledge of the human being.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

Now in the course of modern civilization, humankind has gradually lost the habit of reading nature and, most of all, human nature. Our natural science is not reading nature but mere spelling.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

The whole world is a mystery and Man is the solution.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

What is best in a given situation may be the enemy of the good.
Rudolf Steiner (20th-century Mystic and Philosopher, from his Biography by Christoph Lindenberg)

It is a provision of the spiritual world that every real spiritual fact appears in the script of the starry heavens.
Rudolf Steiner (December 12, 1910)

What is best in a given situation may be the enemy of the good.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925), from his Biography by Christoph Lindenberg)

Discussion beings when knowledge ends.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

The less people are grounded in reality, the more they are usually convinced their opinion is right.
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

The world is deep, deeper than day can comprehend.
Nietzsche

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
Nietzsche

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil”

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusion .
Maurice Chapelain

I don't want to tell you any half-truths unless they're completely accurate.
Dennis Rappaport

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Goethe

Below by Thoreau, from http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tjr01rvw.shtml:

Thoreau says that "True verses are not counted on the poet's fingers, but on his heart-strings." and goes on to express this thought in a poem:

[page 275] Aug. 28, 1841

My life hath been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and live to utter it.

[page 52] August 4, 1838 titled Truth — Whatever of past or present wisdom has published itself to the world, is palpable falsehood till it come and utter itself by my side.

[page 77,78] April 24, 1839 titled Acquaintance — Cheap persons will stand upon ceremony, because there is no other ground; but to the great of the earth we need no introduction, nor do they need any to us.

One wise sentence is worth the state of Massachusetts many times over.

There has been no man of pure genius; as there has been none wholly destitute of genius. Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

Two Quotes below by Thoreau, from http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tjr03rvw.shtml:

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last.
and
Use and commit to life what you cannot commit to memory.
Henry David Thoreau on December 17, in his Journal No. 3 ( 19th-century Naturalist and Writer )

As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way among the fens.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love, and pay him well.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

The true poem is not that which the public reads. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet's life. It is what he has become through his work.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

If words were invented to conceal thought, I think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention.

Obey the spur of the moment. These accumulated it is that make the impulse and the impetus of the life of genius.

This is the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

Methinks a certain polygamy with its troubles is the fate of almost all men. They are married to two wives, their genius ( a celestial muse ) and also to some fair daughter of earth. Unless these two were fast friends before marriage, and so are afterwards, there will be but little peace in the home.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

You must store up none of the life in your gift; it is as fatal as to husband [use sparingly] your breath. We must live all our life.

The purest science is still biographical.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without it.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

Men are the inveterate foes of all improvement . . . If you aspire to anything better than politics, expect no co-operation from men. They will not further anything good.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses. When we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface we call it and the plants which spring from it new; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remote star, we call that new also. It had shone only to itself, and quite superior to our observation.

For a companion I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius.

To make up a great action there are no subordinate mean ones.

It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher, 1817 to 1862)

Here's a poem I wrote about Thoreau after reading "Man of Concord", by Walter Harding (Published in 1960 by Holt Rinehart), a collection of things people said about Thoreau who knew him personally. In this poem I include many aspects of Thoreau's life for which references can be found in the book. For example, someone asked "Why dog-footed?" and I found this reference on page 69 by Charles J. Woodbury:

"The fibre of nature was all through his joints and marrow, and through life he wore her livery. I don't know how long ago, far away in his ancestry (he said he was descended from the Northman, Thorer the dog-footed), she planned him, measured him for his suit."

(Poem "David Henry" Copyright 2001 by Bobby Matherne)

David Henry

The Northman Thorer — the dog-footed

walked in the red snow
His aquiline Roman nose —

his forerunner —

dividing the air

in his holy time.

Smelling of the pine woods

he was present at the birth

and bringing up of Nature

in his native soil.

His transcendental tutor recommended him

to the school board
And later to the Lord, with whom

he had not need to make peace,

having never quarreled with Him.

So noble a soul, this edelweiss,

that none could cut down nor reach

as he walked the grass into the mountains.

This teacher, surveyor, singer, botanist, flute player,

carpenter, inventor, Spartan-Buddhist
Who found 'books in running brooks, sermons in stones,
and good in everything.'

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know.
Mark Twain

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

The map is not the territory — it cannot represent all the territory.
Alfred O. Korzybski, founder of General Semantics

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it limits.
Unknown

A theory is a mask of our ignorance on a subject
Bobby Matherne Link

The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
B. P. Medawar

The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
John Ruskin

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.
John Ruskin

What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven only knows how to put a price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine [Author of the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense and even more.]

Here lies an old tattered Book, its Pages torn out, but which will appear in a new Edition, Revised and Corrected by the Author.
Ben Franklin [Epitaph on his tombstone]

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thomas Jefferson [Third United State President]

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
Thomas Jefferson [Third United State President]

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
Thomas Jefferson [Third United State President]

It is not honorable to take mere legal advantage, when it happens to be contrary to justice.
Thomas Jefferson [Third United State President]

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson (letter to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800)

We know the Race is not to the swift,
nor the Battle to the strong.
Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind
and directs this Storm?
John Page [Virginia statesman writing to Thomas Jefferson after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 20, 1776]

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine [Author of the Declaration of Independence and even more, but no politician.]

[Note the similarity to Paine's quote above, almost to the point of plagiarism, of Goldwater's quote below, that help him lose the presidency in 1964.]

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
Thomas Jefferson [Third United State President]

Only the amateurs stay angry in this town.
Sam Donaldson TV Commentator [Speaking of Washington, D. C. during a Roast for Sen Alan Simpson.]

I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
George Washington

A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.
Robert Louis Stevenson

A lot of people mean well, but their meanness is greater than their wellness.
Robert Hunter

You can't 'educate' the bestiality out of men.
Taylor Caldwell

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.
John Stuart Mill

The recollection of the past is only useful by way of provision for the future.
Samuel Johnson

No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit.
George W. Bush President of USA [in his State of the Union address, January 29, 2003]

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge, President of USA

One is defeated only when one accepts defeat.
Marshall Foch

In your country club, your church, and business, about fifteen percent of the people are screwballs, lightweights, and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress.
Alan Simpson (US Senator from Wyoming)

We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex — but Congress can.
Cullen Hightower

Make a virtue of necessity.
Geoffrey Chaucer

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
C.S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
C.S. Lewis, addressing all religious and political institutions

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
Jean Francois Revel

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity — another man's I mean.
Mark Twain (American Writer, Samuel Clemens)

That most delicious of all privileges — spending other people's money.
John Randolph of Roanoke

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.
Benjamin Disraeli

A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny.
Calvin Coolidge

Virtually everything is under federal control nowadays except the federal budget.
Herman E. Talmadge

Before we give you billions more, we want to know what you've done with the trillion you've got.
Les Aspin

The current tax code is a daily mugging.
Ronald Reagan

Failure is always momentary.
Jack Black in 2006 "King Kong"

If it weren't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them.
A. K. Griffin

As Will Rogers famously observed, every time Congress makes a joke, it's a law. And every time it makes a law, it's a joke. If we could simply harness congressional hot air, America's energy problems would be history.
Paul Driessen

The Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than golf has.
Will Rogers

You hang an ape and a political ancestry over me, and you will see me taking it into the Supreme Court, to prove that the ape part is O.K., but that the political end of it is base libel.
Will Rogers

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer.
Will Rogers

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
Will Rogers

I'm going to take in this flood area. Cal Coolidge didn't send me down here officially, but at least I'm going to talk and write the truth. This flood trouble isn't over yet by a long shot. . . . We've still got Congress to contend with.
Will Rogers

Maybe my ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower but they met the boat.
Will Rogers

All I know is just what I read in the newspapers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.
Will Rogers

"Does college pay? It does if you are a good open field runner."
Will Rogers

I never met a man I didn't like.
Will Rogers

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens. Then everybody disagrees.
Will Rogers (also accredited to Boris Marshalov)

It's a great country but you can't live in it for nothing.
Will Rogers

All I know is just what I read in the Congressional Record. They have had some awful funny articles in there lately. As our government deteriorates, our humor increases.
Will Rogers

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.
Will Rogers

An old, long-whiskered man once said to Teddy Roosevelt: 'I am a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat.'
Roosevelt then said:'Then if your father had been a horse thief and your grandfather had been a horse thief, you would be a horse thief?'
Will Rogers

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) [U.S. Senator and Politician, 20th Century]

What's so bad about the blind leading the blind? The seeing's been leading the seeing all these years and look where it got us!
Pogo the Possum, 1950's comic strip by Walt Kelly

Isn't democracy a system in which the scum could come to the top?
Francis Stuart, WWII Broadcaster [in LRB, 4 Jan 2001, page 6]

Someone once said that ‘All invention is but the extension of the body of man.'
Katherine Janeway, Startrek Voyager ["Scorpion" episode on 12-31-2000]

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it.
Thomas Paine

What is a number that a man may know it: and what is a man that he may know a number?
Warren McColloch (20th Century American Neurophysiologist, Poet, and Prophet)

When I point, look where I point, not at my finger.
Warren McColloch (20th Century American Neurophysiologist, Poet, and Prophet)

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott in Marmion, Canto 6, Stanza 17.

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.
Rumi, Sufi Poet, in The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XIII

In reality the soul is not mortal, but if the soul believes in mortality it is just like being mortal.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer, 18xx-19xx) [from page 20 of Volume VI, Sufi Teachings]

Silence raises the dignity of the wise and hides the stupidity of the foolish.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer, 18xx-19xx) [from page 49 of Volume VI, Sufi Teachings]

While all things have their opposites, it is also true that in each the spirit of the opposite exists.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer, 18xx-19xx) [from page 130 of Volume VIII, Sufi Teachings]

Rumi says in one of his poems, "O sleep, every night thou freest the prisoner from his bonds."
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer, 18xx-19xx)

Optimism comes from God, and pessimism is born from the heart of man.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, page 285, 18xx-19xx)

Self-pity is the worst poverty.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, page 245, 18xx-19xx)

For the just person all is just; for the unjust everything is unjust.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, page 285, 18xx-19xx)

To force a virtue upon anyone is pride; to let him see the beauty of good manners is an education.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, page 240, 18xx-19xx)

In the words of Shankarachaya, "All impossible things can be made possible save the bringing of the fool's mind to the point of truth."
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, page 208, 18xx-19xx)

The judge is the slave of law, the forgiver is its master.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (Sufi writer in his book Sufi Teachings, 18xx-19xx)

[Note the propinquity of the above quote to Rudolf Steiner's "We are slaves to our past, masters of our future." from Macrocosm and Microcosm: "Since we each did certain things in previous lifetimes that have led to the working-out of those things during this lifetime, we may consider ourselves as slaves to our past, but at the same time we may remind ourselves that we are masters of our future. [See page 75, Theosophy of the Rosicrucian by Rudolf Steiner.]" ]

I love Jesus Christ – he was the best of the Jews. Marcel Marceau ( Famous French mime speaking at the Nat Press Club, Jan 28, 2000 on C-SPAN)

The life of the soul in the physical world is a spiritual sleep. Rudolf Steiner (Austrian Philosopher, 1860- 1925)

Some people get lost in thought because it is such unfamiliar territory.
G. Behn

You have to be careful about being too careful.
Beryl Pfizer [Note: this quote illustrates G. Spencer Brown's Second Law of Form.]

There are very few people who don't become more interesting when they stop talking.
Mary Lowry

By the time we've made it, we've had it.
Malcolm Forbes [American Publisher]

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Douglas Casey

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P.J. O'Rourke [Civil Libertarian]

Analogy is not one route to discovery, it is the only route.
Howard Margolis [American professor]

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
Tom Lehrer [American songwriter]

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between.

In any word shine a thousand lights.
from the Zohar (3.202a)

The headline in the Parrot's Weekly read: Titanic Sunk, No Parrots Hurt. Katherine Whitehorn

For many people, change is more threatening than challenging. They see it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting.
Nido Qubein, Business Consultant and Author

Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to critics.
Ambrose Bierce

Critics are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. William Empson [Critic and author]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Following set of quotations are Severe Criticisms by Witty Folks:

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go
  Oscar Wilde ( British Playwright )

• He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
  — Winston Churchill

• I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
  — Clarence Darrow

• He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
  — William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

• I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
  — Groucho Marx

• I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
  — Mark Twain

• He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
  — Oscar Wilde

• I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one.
  — George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

• Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.
  — Winston Churchill to Shaw, in response

• I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here.
  — Stephen Bishop

• He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
  — John Bright

• I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.
  — Irvin S. Cobb

• He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.
  — Samuel Johnson

• He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
  — Paul Keating

• He had delusions of adequacy.
  — Walter Kerr

• Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?
  — Mark Twain

• His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
  — Mae West

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground.
Thomas Jefferson

Judge me and you lose a chance of coming to understand me and through that coming to understand yourself.
Bobby Matherne

A pun is language with a life of its own.
Bobby Matherne

Writing is the art of protecting unique thoughts from disappearing while exposing them to common ignorance.
Bobby Matherne

Fatigue makes cowards of us all. When we are tired a reduced level of serotonin is sent to our frontal cortex which makes us less able to make strong decisions.
Bobby Matherne

A hug is a heart to heart talk.
– Bobby Matherne [January 10, 2003 in his journal.]

The best praise is like mercy – it blesses the giver and the receiver. Bobby Matherne (from Ambrose Bierce)

I was once a young man, but I recovered.
Howard Baker, US Senator [February 1, 1999]

If necessity is the mother of invention, then purpose is the father. — Arthur M. Young
Arthur Young (1905-1995)

One person's uncertainty is the other person's freedom.
Arthur Young (1905-1995)

On retirement: You can't turn back the clock, but you can wind it up again.
Modine Sprull in Hot Springs Village letter.

A Fool was sitting on a bridge, watching the river. Passing by, King Harun saw him and ordered his attendants to drag him away.
"A bridge is for passing, not for staying," the King said.
The Fool answered, "Then you'd better take heed of it yourself. Look how you're clinging to this world, Your Majesty."
Massud Farzan in Another Way of Laughter — A Collection of Sufi Humor

One evening Mulla said to his wife, "Bring us some cheese to eat, for cheese enhances the appetite and makes the eyes bright."
"We are out of cheese," the wife said.
"That is good," Mulla replied, "for cheese is injurious to the teeth and gums."
"Which of your statements is then true?" she asked.
Mulla answered, "If there is cheese is in the house, the first one; if not, the second."
Massud Farzan in Another Way of Laughter — A Collection of Sufi Humor

When two superbly gifted men combine in common endeavors, their strength is not doubled but multiplied fourfold. Each one has the other invisibly next to himself. The formula would not read G + S, but (G + S) + (S + G). The strength of one accrues to the strength of the other.
Hermann Grimm (Born 1821, died June 16, 1901; 19th Century German writer/poet/historian, son of Wilhelm Grimm, and friend of Rudolf Steiner)

The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else.
Frederic Bastiat [economist]

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Frederic Bastiat [economist]

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
Frederic Bastiat [economist]

England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet and Playwright)

Most people lack ideas and repress them in others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb [Writer, Philosopher]

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.
William Blackstone [1723-1780]

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.
Ludwig von Mises [economist]

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.
Ludwig von Mises [economist]

Your young children, dear Parents, will grow old and that will be soon enough to ask for explanations from them. Until then treat them as the royalty they are in the kingdom of childhood. Ask them to describe, not to explain, and you will be welcomed into their court, and you will heap ample rewards from the jewels of their royal treasury.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written in my review of The Little Prince.

Polysemy — not just poetic license, but poetic palette.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written Wednesday, February 1, 2006 in my journal.

Ever we look deeply into things already seen; Poetry carries us to the precipice to view things previously unseen.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written June 27, 1992 atop pages 6 and 7 of my copy of Owen Barfield's "Poetic Diction".

Our modern words are palimpsests of primitive speech.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written June 27, 1992 in Owen Barfield's "Poetic Diction".

Synchronicity is just coincidence with a pedigree! Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written September 22, 2000 in my Journal.

The spiritual world is to the material world as computer software is to its hardware.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written August 12, 2000 in my journal.

Life is a result of the placebo effect, rightly understood.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written November 23, 1999 in an email to Warren Liberty.

I'll take someone who asks good questions over someone who has easy answers any day.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - )

Remember: your Soul Captain leads you if you're willing and drags you if you're unwilling.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written May 22, 1997

Politics is the art of answered questions, education is the art of unanswered questions.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) Written October 28, 1998.

There are no wrong or right ways of doing things, but all ways have their consequences.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written January 10, 1999

A wolf knows that it's a wolf, and runs with the pack.
A sheep knows that it's a sheep and stays with the flock.
And You... What are You...?
If you are Light, You will move toward the Light.
Peter Deunov

The bird is in the air, the stone lies on the land; the fish lives in the water, my spirit is in God's hands.
Angelus Silesia ne Johannes Scheffler (1624-1677)

What is it not to sin? Do not ask much; go, the silent flowers will tell you.
Angelus Silesia ne Johannes Scheffler (1624-1677)

In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it might be true of.
George Miller (American Pyschologist in Thirteen Maxims for the Mind)

Orgasm – the intimate energy.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written by me April 10, 1977 in rear of the book, Peoplemaking, by Virginia Satir.

Denial: the passing breeze of truth.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written January 2, 1987.

The exoteric temple perforce is a place which encourages us to go within to pray.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written August 14, 1984 in The Book of Runes.

Better to have illusions of a reality where everything is real than to have a reality of illusions where nothing is real.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written July 4, 1987 on page 70 of Two Strange Tales by Mircea Eliade.

Certain of these great spiritual truths are true, not just because they are in the Holy Bible, but rather, the Bible is holy because these great spiritual truths are in it.
Thomas Troward (19xx - ) in The Law and the Word, Dodd, Mead & Co., NY, 1917, Ch VIII.

If you perceive a man as good, think of emulating him; If you perceive a man as bad, think of examining your own heart.
Confucius, Analects

Desire is both a very good servant and a very bad master. JoAnn Schwartz (1953 - ) written December 14, 1998 in E-mail post to Steiner98 List.

Just keep throwing those pebbles in the pond of life, 'cause you never know where the ripples will land.
Evan Soulé, Jr.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck (Physicist)

You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.
Albert Einstein (physicist)

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
Anonymous (World Famous Author)

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein (20th-century physicist and celebrity)

"Tell 10 people your dream,
9 of them will discourage you
and 1 of them will steal it."
Ron Wiley

The following series of quotations I heard from Wayne W. Dyer on a PBS tv show. Where I had the attribution of the original quote, I show it, else I attribute it to Dyer.

Don’t die with your music still in your soul.
Wayne W. Dyer (author, c. 1941 - )

You can’t get wet from the word ‘water’.
Alan Watts (author)

The wake does not drive the boat.
Alan Watts (author)

The Chinese say that it is the space between the bars that holds the tiger.
Wayne W. Dyer (author, c. 1941 - )

Treat yourself as if you already were the person you want to become.
Wayne W. Dyer (author, c. 1941 - )

Wisdom is avoiding every thought which weakens you.
Wayne W. Dyer (author, c. 1941 - )

A government policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

The letter kills, and the spirit enlivens.

In order to subject fortune and things to yourself, begin by making yourself independent of them. To reign by opinion, begin by reigning over it.

We have a precise history of peoples who are destroying themselves; what we lack is the history of peoples who are thriving.

In giving himself the need to hurt me, this man has made his fate dependent on mine.

Man is therefore free in his actions and as such is animated by an immaterial substance.

Volenti nihil difficile. [Nothing is difficult to him who wills.]

Generally people who know little speak a great deal, and people who know a great deal speak little.

The most unfortunate effect of formal politeness is to teach the art of getting along without the virtues it imitates.

If you have a spark of genius, go and spend a year in Paris. Soon you will be all that you can be, or you will never be anything.

Ubi bene, ibi patria. [Where there is good, there is the land I am father of.]

A person is never ridiculous except when he follows fixed practices.

The small fatherland which is the heart.

Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere.

If there is happiness on earth, it must be sought in the abode where we live.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) French Philosopher

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

If you chase after money and security, your heart will never unclench.
Lao-Tze

The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether humans do
B. F. Skinner

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.
Thomas Szasz

Fools admire everything in a celebrated author. I only read to please myself, and I only like what suits me. - Pococurante in Candide
Voltaire (French Author and Philosopher)

A celebrated author is one whose name appears above and in bigger letters than the title on the cover of the book.
Voltaire (French Author and Philosopher)

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Author The True Believer

Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death, Hope sees a star, and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator c. 1892, from eulogy to his brother, Ebon)

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars — an intellectual ocean — toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.

We go as far as we can, and the rest of the way we say — God.

A life should not be written until it has been lived.

The laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.
Robert G. Ingersoll (American lawyer and orator)

It can be said of Ingersoll, as was written of Castelar, that his eloquent utterances are as the finely-fashioned ornamental designs on a Damascus blade, — the blade cuts as keenly, and the embellishments beautify without retarding its power.
The Capital, a leading journal in Washington

Where is the tree from which the fruit drops into mind's basket?
Jane Roberts, American Philosopher

I produce music like an apple tree produces music.
Camille Saint-Saen, Classical Composer

Permission is freedom to; protection is freedom from. Most things that happen to us, happen to provide freedom, either freedom to or freedom from.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written December 11, 1997

Typing — the flying fingers of thought.
Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written January 4, 2004

It's a mistake to make no mistake. Sometimes it's better to Ready, Fire, Aim! Bobby Matherne (1940 - ) written May 22, 1986 on page 132 of Autobiography of a Sufi by E. J. Gold. The first sentence is my summary of the next quotation from Gold. "Ready, Fire, Aim" was the name given to Terry Surrency's way of running his business.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, — but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes ( ) American Jurist and Author

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be, may have cosmic destinies he does not understand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes American Jurist and Author

One must begin to make experiments in Self-Study, even if on occasion a mistake is made. It is better in most cases to do it wrong than not to do it at all. A wrong beginning can be corrected, if the psyche does not fight too much against correction, but if no beginning is made, nothing can be corrected, and there is no hope of making any progress from the crystallized psyche state to the open essence state.
E. J. Gold on page 132 of Autobiography of a Sufi

An ulcer, gentlemen, is an unkissed imagination taking its revenge for having been jilted. It is an unwritten poem, an undanced dance, an unpainted watercolor. It is a declaration from the mankind of the man that a clear spring of joy has not been tapped and that it must break through muddily, on its own.
John Ciardi, American poet addressing a group of powerful businessmen.

Darkness chills, but Light fills what Truth wills.
Bobby Matherne, written December 6, 1997

There ain't no education in the second kick of the mule.
Harold Rogers Congressman from Kentucky addressing the House August 5, 1998

Don't squat with your spurs on.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in.

If you're ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.

If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.

After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him... The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

There's two theories to arguin' with a woman. Neither one works.

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.

Never slap a man who's chewin' tobacco.

It don't take a genius to spot a goat in a flock of sheep.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person, don't be surprised if they learn their lesson.

When you're throwin' your weight around, be ready to have it thrown around by somebody else.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

There are three kinds of people. The kind that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Will Rogers (20th Century American Humorist)

Art is long, life short;
judgment difficult,
opportunity transient.
Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)

We must earn again for ourselves what we have inherited.
Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)

Everything is leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest diversity becomes possible.
Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)

Only when we play are we fully human, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word.
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Only through Beauty's morning-gate do you penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Laughter is the crest of a wave of felt vitality.
Suzanne Langer (19xx- ) written in Feeling and Form

If I'd known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.
Eubie Blake (American Musician, on his 105th birthday)

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Kahlil Gibran in Essay on Death in The Prophet

A man can be free without being great, but no man can be great without being free.
Kahlil Gibran in May 16, 1913 letter to Mary Haskell

Our love will last until the stars grow cold.
Patricia Elin Brewer (1940- ) written July 20, 1972 inside cover of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran [gift to Bobby Matherne on his 32nd birthday]

The doctor does not need to reconstruct a traumatic moment; the traumatic moment continues to exist in every breath the patient takes, in every gesture he makes.
Richard Grossinger (19xx- ) in Planet Medicine [Referenced by Ron Kurtz in Hakomi Therapy]

Character patterns are the result of an ongoing interaction of the growing child with its physical/emotional environment.
[RJM Note: The most important character patterns are doyles, i.e., the ones laid down before the Memory Transition Age of five according to the science of doyletics.]
Ron Kurtz in Hakomi Therapy (1989)

ALGEDONIC LOOP — the feedback an organism, organization or machine receives from the environment. The algedonic loop is the large feedback loop that goes outside the organism and, through reward or punishment, indicates the environment's response to the organism's behavior. Stafford Beer, American Writer

Opponents of capital punishment claim that execution is not a deterrent, but they have yet to produce a single executed murderer who has killed again!
Federalist Digest, 02 December 2005.

I'm glad he passed through this life.
Al Toussaint, musician and composer said of Al Hirt, trumpet great on his death, April 27, 1999.

Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.
Petrarch (1304-1374)

I could not face making a mechanism of my mind.
Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) — upon quitting Law School in Bologne

Arguments against new ideas generally pass through three distinct stages: from 'It's not true' to "Well, it may be true, but it's not important." to "It's true and it's important, but it's not new — we knew it all along." Unpopular Wisdom
John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe.

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James, Lecture Six, Second Paragraph (page 131)

All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 German Philosopher)

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 German Philosopher)

Man is the only computer that can be created by unskilled labor.
Werner Von Braun (American Rocket Pioneer)

Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.
Andre Malraux (French Novelist)

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 German Philosopher)

The fact is sometimes overlooked that one reason why many of us continue to manifest our neurotic woes is that we manage to find people with whom to integrate on a neurotic level.
Don Jackson, Communication, Family, and Marriage, page 3.

You are a wooden board, Intel is a threader fastener. Microsoft is a tool that drives threaded fasteners into wooden boards. Are you getting the picture?
Alice Hill and Bill O'Brien in The Hard Edge in The Computer Shopper, Sept. 1998.

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it and it will go nowhere at all. It's just that way when it comes to leading people.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower [He used to demonstrate the art of leadership with a simple piece of string. He'd place the string on the table and say the above.]

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.... I do not want to belong to any organization of a spiritual kind; please understand this ... If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth....

This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.... For 18 years you have been preparing for this event, for the Coming of the World Teacher. For 18 years you have organized, you have looked for someone who would give a new delight to your hearts and minds ... who would set you free — and now look what is happening! Consider, reason with yourselves, and discover in what way that belief has made you different ... in what way are you freer, greater, more dangerous to every society which is based on the false and the unessential?...

You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else.... You have been accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible?... I desire those, who seek to understand me, to be free ... from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself.... You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.
Krishnamurti (1895-) From his last speech to the Theosophical Society

You can’t see what to do, you can see only what not to do. The total negation of that road is the new beginning, the other road. This other road is not on the map, nor can it ever be put on any map. Every map is a map of the wrong road, the old road.
Krishnamurti [Final page of Don't Push the River by Barry Stevens]

To protect men from the results of their folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle, British Writer (1859-1930)

Children are made readers on the laps of their parent. Emilie Buchwald (Minnesota Writer, Written in 1994)

Now, I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human, mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco, Italian Writer (19xx - )

He has never learned anything, and he can do nothing in decent style.
Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), composer/theoretician, music teacher of Hummel and Beethoven about his student, Ludwig van Beethoven.

NOTE: Hayden composed 104 symphonies and Beethoven only 9, but Hayden was composing cookie-cutter symphonies of the time, in a decent style, i.e. kitsch, and Beethoven was creating new forms of music with every symphony. In the quote below, Beethoven talks about art as the process of destruction of the sameness, the style, which exists at any one time. Hayden replicated the sameness; Beethoven destroyed it.

Art demands that we never stand still.
Ludwig van Beethoven ( 18,19th-century Pianist and Composer )

Statistically speaking, every human has one ovary and one testicle.
Bob Greenberg ( of San Francisco Performances, 21st Century Composer and Lecturer for Teaching Co.)

The improver of knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English Philosopher and Economist

We have discovered that it is actually an aid in the search for knowledge to understand the nature of the knowledge which we seek.
Sir Arthur Eddington, Philosopher

If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675

We are as children on the shoulders of a giant, able to see what he can, and a little more.
Joseph Joubert (1529-1583)

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ancestor to every action is a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James

Thou hast commanded that an ill-regulated mind should be its own punishment.
Saint Augustine

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. (from A Glimpse of Eve's Diary)
Mark Twain (American Humorist, ne Samuel Clemens, early 20th Century)

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. (Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)
(American Humorist, ne Samuel Clemens, early 20th Century)

Duct tape is like the Force: it has a dark side and a light side, and it holds the universe together.
Roman Sturgis

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
Christian Morgenstern (German humorous poet, 1871-1914)

There is a saying in Spanish: Es mejor morir solo que en mala compania. It is better to die alone than in bad company.
Constance McQuoid

Ah, but a man´s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what´s a heaven for?
Robert Browning

With me faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.
Robert Browning in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”

Stuck: that's when "Everywhere I went led me where I didn't want to go."
Paul Simon, Singer and Songwriter on Dick Cavett Show, 20th Century

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
William Blake, English poet, artist, and mystic

Opposition is true Friendship.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake, English poet, artist, and mystic

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
William Blake

America: where a head with an idea and a heart with a dream can achieve anything.
Fred Thompson, Senator, 20th Century

Lithos oy lithos. The stone that is not a stone.
Bobby Matherne, Physicist, 21st Century

Theory is the free invention of the human mind.
Albert Einstein, Physicist, 20th Century

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.
Albert Einstein, Physicist, 20th Century

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein, Physicist, 20th Century

This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Western Union internal memo, 1876

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895

The true physicist will be a bold explorer — not picking at the universe with small tools, but allowing his consciousness to flow into the many open doors that can be found with no instrument, but with the mind.
Seth, via Jane Roberts in The Unknown Reality

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell, commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

...And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you where would you hide...the laws being all flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man´s laws, not God´sand if you cut them down...do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
Marshall Ferdinand Foch, professor of strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre

Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work, 1921

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?
David Sarnoff's associates, in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
Harry M. Warner, Warner Bros., 1927

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
Thomas Edison, American Industrialist

There is no reason for any individuals to have a computer in their home.
Ken Olsen, president, Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

ars longs, vita brevis (art is long, life is short)
Seneca

When the terrain differs from the map, believe the terrain.
Per Holst, quoting the Norwegian Boy Scout Handbook

For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Plato (274-275 BC) in Phaedrus

Given our monstrous, overgrown government structure, any three letters chosen at random would probably designate an agency or part of a department that could be profitably abolished.
— Milton Friedman (American Economist)

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
— Milton Friedman (American Economist, and from his statement, I suspect, an optimist!)

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
—Plato

The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.
Mencius

There are many ways to measure success; not the least of which is the way your child describes you when talking to a friend."
Unknown

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
Chinese Proverb

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.
John F. Kennedy

They are voting whether to keep a governor two years or four. I think a good, honest governor should get four years, and the others life.
Will Rogers

A Great Dane-sized whiz down every American's leg.
John Kennedy, Senator from Louisiana re: 2018 1.3 Trillion dollar ombnibus bill passed by Congress

Ronald Reagan: a man who may have lost his memory, but will never be forgotten.
Rep. Rohrbacher R. California (former Reagan speech writer)(C-Span, May 1, 1996)

We've turned the safety net into a hammock. (Ed. note: "safety net" was a Reagan phrase)
J. D. Hayworth U.S. Representative from Arizona (C-Span, May 1, 1996, 13:15 CST)

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) American Humorist, poet, and writer

For by earth we see earth, by water water; by air bright air, and by fire brilliant fire.
Empedocles (450 BC) Greek philosopher

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) Psychologist and writer.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.
Robert Frost (American Poet 1874 - 1963)

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
The secret sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost (American Poet 1874 - 1963)

If something is unsustainable, it tends to stop. Or, as the old adage advises, If your horse dies, we suggest you dismount. 
Herbert Stein (19xx-19xx) Economist and humorist.

I will not listen to any excuses, not even the truth!
Berdini in movie, Top Hat

The realms of nature are the letters, and man is the word that is composed of these letters.
Paracelsus (1493-1541 pseudonym of Swiss-born alchemist and physician, actual name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim)

The physician is only the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore, it behooves medicine to follow the will of nature.
Paracelsus (1493-1541)

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910 American writer, pseudonym was Mark Twain)

Everlasting day can no more freshen the earth with dew than everlasting night, but the change from night to day and from day back again to night.
Owen Barfield (1900-1999 English Philosopher )

When an inspiration becomes active within us, our muscles pull us all on their own to the right spot where destiny awaits us.
Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861- March 30,1925 Austrian Philosopher)

This is generally true: inner qualities grow out of the past, but beauty is created by the present.
Rudolf Steiner (c. 1922, page 139 of "From Crystals to Crocodiles", Austrian Philosopher)

All knowledge of what is visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve.
Rudolf Steiner (c. 1909, page 49 of "An Outline of Occult Science", Austrian Philosopher)

The archetype of music is in the spiritual, whereas the archetypes for the other arts lie in the physical world itself.
Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861- March 30,1925 Austrian Philosopher)

When we try to impose an idea upon another person, we are trying to implant our own concept into another person; this concept we have implanted into another person is the blunted weapon that Cain plunged into Abel.
Rudolf Steiner in a lecture on Cain and Abel, March 27, 1913. (Austrian Philosopher)

Everything that man creates he must create from out of the spirit.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher

Feelings live longer than ideas.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher

Disease in many cases is the only means whereby the good powers can save man from the clutches of Ahriman.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher, spoken Nov. 16, 1922 in London.

That the academic world has managed to dismiss Rudolf Steiner¹s works as inconsequential and irrelevant is one of the intellectual wonders of the twentieth century. Anyone who is willing to study these vast works with an open mind (let us say a hundred of his titles) will find themselves confronted with one of the greatest thinkers of all time, whose grasp of modern science is equalled only by his profound learning in the ancient ones. Steiner was no more of a mystic than Albert Einstein; he was a scientist, rather — but a scientist who dared enter into the mysteries of life.
Russell Davenport (Former Managing Editor of Fortune Magazine)

A good book should awaken the life of the spirit, not simply impart a certain quantity of information. Reading it should be an experience with inner shocks, tensions, and solutions.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher

When books and an individual come into collision and there is a hollow sound, this need not be the fault of the books!
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher

The mind is related to thought, as the eye is to light.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher

Here we see verified a great historical truth that should be of special importance to spiritual scientists . . . In general, when people discuss, you can consider it a sign that they really have no knowledge of the subject they are discussing. Where knowledge exists, knowledge is imparted and there is no particular desire for discussion. Where there is desire for discussion, however, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of a decline regarding the seriousness of a subject when it is discussed. Disintegration of a particular trend is always proclaimed by discussions. It is important that in spiritual science we come increasingly to understand that the wish for discussion may really be taken as a sign of ignorance. On the other hand, the opposite of discussion, the will to learn, the will gradually to comprehend what is in question should be cultivated..
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) Austrian Philosopher) Berlin 02/15/09

On Sevenfold Man:
Our Father which art in heaven. Thy WILL be done. ~~ SPIRIT MAN
Thy KINGDOM come. ~~ LIFE SPIRIT
Hallowed be they NAME. ~~ SPIRIT SELF
Deliver us from EVIL. ~~ EGO
Lead us not into TEMPTATION. ~~ ASTRAL BODY
Forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us. ~~ ETHERIC BODY
Give us this day our daily bread. ~~ PHYSICAL BODY
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925, Austrian Philosopher) in Berlin, 28.1.07, Das Vaterunser, eine esoterische Betrachtung, from GA96

It would be a very good thing if every trick could receive some short and obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular trick, he could at once be reproved for it.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 German Philosopher) [in Fallacy — the Counterfeit of Argument]

In music man perceives the heartbeat of the will of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 German Philosopher)

The only institution that can deliver care with love: the family.
Alan Keyes (1996 Presidential Candidate)

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert von Szent-Györgyi

If people don't go to see a picture, nobody can stop them.
Billy Wilder (American Film Director)

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Adam Smith

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Brooks Adams (Education of Henry Adams (1907) ch. 16)

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me. (Responding to a savage review by Rudolph Louis in Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 7 February 1906)
Max Reger

Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper. Robert E. Lee, Civil War General

Only the clever can experience tragedy; others merely stumble into accidents. Bobby Matherne, American Philosopher (1940 - )

'Tis better to be alone than in the company of fools. Bobby Matherne, American Philosopher (1940 - )

Art is the process of destruction. Bobby Matherne, American Philosopher (1940 - )

Culture is like making coffee — all the problems come simply from the lack of proper sequence.
Bobby Matherne, American Philosopher (1940 - )

One who laughs, lasts. Bobby Matherne, American Philosopher (1940 - )

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
Nelson Algren

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish-born Painter (1881-1973)

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Art is the path of the creator to his work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

The sin of the desert is: You know where water is but you don’t tell anyone.”
Jason Illian on the Hour of Power, American Writer

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Whoever thinks intently will find an image more or less luminous rise in his mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the imprtunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1802-1882)

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, (1875-1961)

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, (1875-1961)

In a society in which there is no real justice, legality is everything.
Professor Rufus Fears

Justice isn’t blind, she’s embarrassed. That’s why she wears a blindfold.
Christian Slater in movie, "Who Is Cletis Tout?" (2002)

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau [19th Century American Naturalist, Poet, and Writer]

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.
Henry David Thoreau, American Philosopher (1817-1862)

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau, American Philosopher (1817-1862)

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau, American Philosopher (1817-1862)

People are the nucleus of great idea that hasn't come to be yet.
Richard Pryor, American Comedian (19 - 20 )

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon, English Philosopher (1561-1626)

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.
Francis Bacon, English Philosopher (1561-1626)

Art is man added to nature.
Francis Bacon, English Philosopher (1561-1626)

Dogmas are fences round the mystery.
Saint Augustine, Latin father of the Church (354-430)

Art is I; Science is We.
Claude Bernard, French physiologist (1813-1878)

Claude Bernard was right.
Louis Pasteur, French physiologist (1822-1895) His last words – referring to Bernard's holistic view of disease vs his own view that bacteria is the root of all diseases.

Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
Carl Sandburg, American poet from "The People Will Live On" What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, American sculptor (1848-1907)

Political history is far too criminal a subject to be a fit thing to teach children.
W. H. [Wystan Hugh] Auden (1907 - 1973) Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin, French painter (1848-1903)

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
Anthony Burgess, British Author (1917- )

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Henri Matisse, French artist (1869-1954)

Art made tongue-tied by authority.
William Shakespeare, English dramatist and poet (1564-1616)

Art should simplify . . . finding what convention of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather, American writer (1876-1947)

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak;
courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill, British prime minister (1874-1965)

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
Winston Churchill, British prime minister (1874-1965)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill, British prime minister (1874-1965)

The law is the king; the king is not the law.
US Republican Representative on House floor, December 18, 1998, during impeachment debate.

Time and again we wanted the essence of the truth and we got instead the edges of the truth.
J. C. Watts, US Republican Representative on House floor, December 19, 1998, during impeachment debate.

So what do we do with the temperature sense? We do only one thing in our soul: we want to meet the world. We are interested in the world. Now, the world can respond to us in either one or two ways. When we are interested, when we open ourselves, we either get something back or we get nothing back. When we get nothing back we experience cold, but when we receive something, we experience a sense of warmth. This is the secret of experiencing warmth, namely that our attention, our interest, our absorption is answered. We feel included. Do we need warmth from our fellow human beings? Can we leave someone out in the cold? We always radiate interest and expect to be met with warmth.
Albert Soesman in his book, The Twelve Senses

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Winston Churchill, British prime minister (1874-1965)

If you don't have the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over again?
Anonymous (World's most prolific writer)

What orators lack in depth they make up to you in length.
Charles de Montesquieu, French philosophist and jurist (1689-1755)

If possible, try to find a way to come downstairs that doesn't involve going bump, bump, bump, on the back of your head. —
Pooh in Winnie the Pooh A.A. Milne, English author (1882-1956)

Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.
Suzuki Roshi

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden, English poet (1907-1973)

To my dearest Robert, This is the last present I am going to give you this week unless you start jumping up and down more. Love, Patty
(Inscribed by Patricia Elin Brewer Matherne October 10, 1975 in front overleaf of Tristan und Isold)

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve the problems of life not only theoretically, but practically.
Henry David Thoreau, American Philosopher (1817-1862) in Walden

Let me explain in terms of the martial arts. As a beginner you know nothing of stance or sword position, so you have nothing in yourself to dwell on mentally. If someone strikes at you, you just fight, without thinking of anything. Then when you learn various things like stance, how to wield a sword, where to place the attention, and so on, your mind lingers on various points, so you find yourself all tangled up when you try to strike. But if you practise day after day and month after month, eventually stance and swordplay don't hang on your mind any more, and you are like a beginner who knows nothing ... . The cogitating side of your brain will vanish and you will come to rest in a state where there is no concern.
Takuan, 16th Century Japanese Zen teacher, in explaining the shift from unconscious incompetence, through conscious incompetence and conscious competence, to unconscious competence.

Notwithstanding all that has been said about the beauty of a ship under full sail, there are very few who have ever seen a ship, literally, under all her sail. A ship coming in or going out of port, with her ordinary sails, and perhaps two or three studding sails, is commonly said to be under full sail; but a ship never has all her sail upon her, except when she has a light, steady breeze, very nearly, but not quite, dead aft, and so regular that it can be trusted, and is likely to last for some time. Then, with all her sails, light and heavy, and studding sails, on each side, alow and aloft, she is the most glorious moving object in the world. Such a sight very few, even some who have been at sea a good deal, have ever beheld; for from the deck of your own vessel you cannot see her, as you would a separate object.
Richard Dana, Jr, American writer (1812-1882) in Two Years Before the Mast, 1840

Many people will walk in and out of your life,
But only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
To handle yourself, use your head;
To handle others, use your heart.

Anger is only one letter short of danger.
If someone betrays you once, it is his fault;
If he betrays you twice, it is your fault.
Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people.

He who loses money, loses much;
He who loses a friend, loses much more;
He who loses faith, loses all.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature,
But beautiful old people are works of art.
Learn from the mistakes of others -
you can't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Eleanor Roosevelt, American politician, wife of FDR

High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Wherever lark, or even eagle, flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Memorable or Forgettable Poetry Quotations

Many years ago I received this list of what makes a poem memorable or forgettable by well-known poets and/or critics. I have striven to make my poems fall into the memorable category. Bobby Matherne

The Pattern:

What makes a poem memorable?
       What makes a poem forgettable?
            Name of Journal
            Name of Author

A fresh take on abiding themes, technical command and finesse, an ear, an eye, poise of thought, depth of feeling.
       The absence of the above — usually evident very first line.
            The Yale Review
            J.D. McClatchy

Those that have a stunning combination of musicality with unique or unexpected imagery on any topic.
       One that states the obvious in an obvious way.
            The Northern Centinel
            Ellen Rachlin and Lucie Aidinoff

A poem is most memorable when it surprises, when it creates poetry anew, when it truly "makes" rather than arrives as the "made over" work I generally see. This does not mean, however, that the poem is successful.
       Sameness and safety — many of these are publishable, but merely so.
            Quarterly West
            M.L. Williams

Striking imagery and unusual slants on ideas, expressed in lines exquisitely crafted to carry an individual voice.
       Mundane imagery more than anything else.
            Southern Poetry Review
            Ken McLaurin

Sharp images, apt writing, strong rhythm.
       Dull thinking.
            The Gettysburg Review
             Peter Stitt

Urgency. Clarity. Formal rigor (be it "free" or metered verse), language that expresses both a lively, curious mind and an empathetic heart.
       Pre-packaged ideas, language that takes the safest,"you have already been approved!"
       approach to its subjects. Cynicism.
            Agni
            Erin Belieu

A poem with content that touches us at a deep level; that uses language beautifully, movingly; that has images that are relevant, moving, striking, used in an original manner; clarity of thought; fresh perspective; original ideas.
       Poetry with no depth or beauty of language/image and without significant content;
       unoriginal imagery or subject matter; inappropriate subject matter (i.e., glorification of war).
            Calyx
            Beverly McFarland

Originality of subject and expression, and rhythm.
       Triteness, antiquated language, excessive ego.
            The Formalist
            William Baer

Sophistication and accessibility. I believe the best poems appeal to the widest audience. I especially value visceral poems with uncanny, accurate images. I appreciate well-crafted poems, too. I want urgent poems I can't forget. Poems so lyrical they leap off the page.
       Self-indulgence. Poetry is art, not therapy. If you can incorporate the two, that's a plus.
      Ultimately, though, sheer (or un-bridled) emotion isn't enough to carry a poem.
            The Ledge
            Timothy Monaghan

A distinctive voice, imagery that is tactile and accurate, music, craft, care. Language.
       The absence of those qualities.
            The Nation
            Grace Schulman

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