quotations

I've been lugging this list of quotations around for years. I collected most of them by the time I was half my current age. Are they still mine?

Then again, were they ever? Some of them, true, are woven into my thinking to the point where I actually understand them... some, even, to the point where I actually live by them. 🙃😉

Perspective

• The only limits are, as always, those of vision. —James Broughton
• The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. —Thomas Merton
• Change your thoughts and you change your world. —Norman Vincent Peale
• Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one. —Voltaire
• A person cannot depend on the eyes when the imagination is out of focus. —Mark Twain
• The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust
• The universe is made of stories, not atoms. —Muriel Rukeyser
• Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. —Basho
• Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. —Carl Jung
• It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. —Henry David Thoreau
• The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. —Max De Pree

Writing and speaking

• Never express yourself more clearly than you think. —Niels Bohr
• Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. —Plato
• The word “and” trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes... —William James
• Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. —Julian Barnes
• In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. —Paul Dirac
• Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether: lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. —Joan Didion, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
• Writers are people who find writing more difficult than other people. —Thomas Mann
• A poem is never finished, only abandoned. —Paul Valery
• No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing. —Strunk and White
• A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it from his overcoat pocket. —Charles Péguy
• A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. —Italo Calvino
• You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. —Madeleine L'Engle
• Writing: if I am honest about what's going on in me, it should read as if it's about you. —Alain de Botton
• I write to discover what I know. —Flannery O’Connor
• My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. —George Bernard Shaw
• The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. —George Bernard Shaw
• Write hard and clear about what hurts. —Ernest Hemingway

Education and intelligence

• Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. —Oscar Wilde
• Kasper's Second Law: Try to know where and how your thoughts arise and always give credit to your teachers.
• Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
• Rabkin's Dictum: If you don't understand something, it's because you aren't aware of its context.
• Thinking you know something creates the perfect barrier against learning. —Frank Herbert
• There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that anyone can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed. —A.J. Ayer
• Receive the children in reverence; educate them in love; let them go forth in freedom. —Rudolf Steiner
• Whether I went to school or not, I would always study. —RZA
• It's important to have a little irreverence for the way it is said to be, so you can find out how it really is. —Nicholas Steadman
• I owe more to my ability to fantasize than to any knowledge I've ever acquired. —Albert Einstein
• Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. —John Steinbeck
• Kellys' First Law: Power, understanding, control. Pick any two.
• You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher. —Rudolf Steiner
• Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. —G. K. Chesterson
• The only real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions. —Leo Tolstoy
• There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. —Niels Bohr
• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. —Dorothy Parker
• A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. —Carl Sagan
• You find peace by coming to terms with what you don’t know. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Systems thinking

• Kellys' Second Law: Nobody is as smart as everybody.
• You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —Buckminster Fuller
• I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics. —Charles Péguy
• Institutions reject radical ideas, which in turn become institutions that reject radical ideas. —Saul Bass
• The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. —William Gibson
• Everything is double-edged or more. —The Arpanet Dialogues
• All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. But as these ideas gain currency they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation loses its predictive power. —Dan Drezneras
• In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Technology and design

• The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. —Albert Einstein
• Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. —David Gelernter
• To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. —Anonymous, via levitated.net
• Warwick's Second Law: Art tells the jokes that science insists on explaining.

The art of living

• Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. —Anais Nin
• The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. —Henry Miller
• Goodwin's Limited Law: The truth has as many faces as there are beings that express it. So no-one is ever wrong. Everyone is right, though in limited ways. Wisdom lies in spotting the limitation while being grateful for the insight.
• If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. —Ray Bradbury
• Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. —Mark Twain
• A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. —Friedrich Nietzsche
• The stars appear every night in the sky. All is well. —Fortune cookie
• Gilbert's Law: Happy people are those who do not pass up an opportunity to laugh at themselves or to make love with someone else. Unhappy people are those who get this backwards.
• If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession. —Carlos Castaneda
• Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same. They lead nowhere… Does this path have a heart is the only question. If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, then it is of no use. — Carlos Castaneda
• There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. —Annie Dillard
• Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.  It will not lead you astray. —Rumi

Work

• Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion. —Simon Sinek
• What makes innovative work exciting is that you’re never sure it’s any good. —John Ashbery
• Not doing what you're passionate about professionally is like saving sex for your old age. —Warren Buffett
• What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. —Jane Goodall
• I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. —Thomas A. Edison
• If you don't do it this year, you will be one year older when you do. --Warren Miller

Art

• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. —Scott Adams
• Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. —Jonathan Lethem
• Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Play is the highest form of research. —Albert Einstein

Honesty

• The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. —J.M. Barrie
• It requires a certain degree of humility to appreciate that all that is within one’s field of observation and experience isn’t all that there is. —Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

Karma

• When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. —Abraham Lincoln
• Sow a thought and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a personality; sow a personality and you reap a destiny. —Buddhist saying

Love

• To love is to understand, protect, and bring well-being to the object of your love. —Thich Nhat Hanh

Compassion

• I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful. —John Ruskin
• The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose. —Mahatma Gandhi
• There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Poor people fight for food. Rich people share their food. Richer are those who share power. Richer still are those who share fame. Richest of all are those who share themselves. A person's wealth is measured by his ability to share and not by what he hoards. —Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Social relations

• The distinction between laborer and intellectual must be effaced. —V. I. Lenin
• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. —Bertrand Russell
• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. —Kurt Vonnegut
• Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. —Thomas Jefferson
• Our culture must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. —Marcus Aurelius
• The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart. —Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
• Resist those who try to predict and set your fate. —fortune cookie

Social change

• There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. —Aldous Huxley
• History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. —Mark Twain
• Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. —Howard Thurman
• If you want to serve the age, betray it. —Brendan Kennelly
• There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork... To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence... The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace, it destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. —Thomas Merton
• At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. —Che Guevara
• Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing. —Arundhati Roy

The Hero's Journey

• So let the voyager go. He has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning; yet, as in the old legend of Gilgamesh and his long, deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is the one green value of his life down there. Don’t cut him off from it: help him through. —Joseph Campbell
• Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. —John O'Donohue
• You yourself must strive. The Buddhas only point the way. —Buddha
• Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. —Basho
• What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things. — Rilke

Finally...

• I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. —Ralph Waldo Emerson