Finding Solace in Favourite Quotes: Escaping Despair with Words of Wisdom

[NeoDevin]

Christopher Pike

Or if you include the animated series, there was also Robert April.

 

[Huckleberry]

Maybe the love of 'logic and wisdom'--

(word's meanings may have changed a little since they sat around the Colosseum drinking and watching the action.)

So if I asked you about art you could
give me the skinny on every art book
ever written...Michelangelo?
You know a lot about him I bet. Life's
work, criticisms, political aspirations.
But you couldn't tell me what it smells
like in the Sistine Chapel. You've
never stood there and looked up at
that beautiful ceiling. And if I asked
you about women I'm sure you could
give me a syllabus of your personal
favorites, and maybe you've been laid
a few times too. But you couldn't
tell me how it feels to wake up next
to a woman and be truly happy. If I
asked you about war you could refer me
to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional
material, but you've never been in
one. You've never held your best
friend's head in your lap and watched
him draw his last breath, looking to
you for help. And if I asked you about
love I'd get a sonnet, but you've never
looked at a woman and been truly
vulnerable. Known that someone could
kill you with a look. That someone
could rescue you from grief.
That God had put an angel on Earth
just for you. And you wouldn't know
how it felt to be her angel. To have
the love be there for her forever.
Through anything, through cancer. You
wouldn't know about sleeping sitting
up in a hospital room for two months
holding her hand and not leaving because
the doctors could see in your eyes
that the term "visiting hours" didn't
apply to you. And you wouldn't know
about real loss, because that only
occurs when you lose something you
love more than yourself, and you've
never dared to love anything that much.
I look at you and I don't see an
intelligent confident man, I don't see
a peer, and I don't see my equal. I
see a boy. Nobody could possibly
understand you, right Will? Yet you
presume to know so much about me because
of a painting you saw. You must know
everything about me. You're an orphan,
right?

Will nods quietly.

SEAN (cont'd)
Do you think I would presume to know
the first thing about who you are
because I read "Oliver Twist?" And I
don't buy the argument that you don't
want to be here, because I think you
like all the attention you're getting.
Personally, I don't care. There's
nothing you can tell me that I can't
read somewhere else. Unless we talk
about your life. But you won't do
that. Maybe you're afraid of what
you might say.

Robin Williams - Good Will Hunting

(And yet some things stay the same.)

 

[Ivan Seeking]

~ "This year I will vote however my wife does. In 2000, she voted for Gore, and I voted for Bush, and I will never live it down"

--- viewer comment today on the Cafferty File

 

[pace]

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

The bad thing about being unemployed is that right when you get up, you're on the job.

- Unknown


Not so funny:

I used to be a vegetarian, but then I leaned to the sunny side of life.

- Don't remember.

 

[pace]

This one's a bit consilidating for us hobby-philosophers who doesn't seem to get a deegre from it:

"A good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and a good philosopher is at least half a mathematician" - Gottlob Frege.

uh, maybe not so consilidating since he ended up quite lonely and depressed himself. Great historical mathematician and logican nonetheless.

 

[Andre]

Knowledge is power.
Power currupts.

Knowledge corrupts?

 

[rewebster]

Who was the sixth?

Riker

 

[rewebster]

Robin Williams - Good Will Hunting

good movie---

 

[jim mcnamara]

This is my favorite quote:

If you went to the trouble to read this, then you have too much time on your hands:
Terry: God helps those who help themselves
Larry: God helps thieves?
[/color]

 

[ranger]

From am episode of scrubs:

Cox: You are, in fact, a perfectly healthy 26-year-old doctor who keeps
whining about how horrible his father was.
J.D.: Well, he did some considerable emotional damage, so...
Cox: Every one of our parents does considerable emotional damage, and from
what I've heard, it just might be the best part of being a
parent. Now, if some guy ever does put a ring on your finger and
you're lucky enough to pop out a youngster I'm sure you'll
understand. But for now, believe me when I tell you I wouldn't
care if this was the first time you ever met your daddy. Because,
in reality... well, he could have done a much, much worse job.

 

[DaveC426913]

From am episode of scrubs:

I love Scrubs.

Inimitably, Cox' line there is actually a compliment to J.D. (read last line, all the rest is smoke screen).

 

[rewebster]

Quote from my Grandfather:

I was about twelve staying with the grandparents one summer and he answered my question about which piece of chicken he liked to eat first (but it really covers just about anything in life):

"Eat the best first, and you'll always have the best."

(meaning: of what's left, there will a 'best' of the group still to choose from)

 

[RyanSchw]

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are.” –Richard Feynman

“I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don’t confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything is gonnna be alright.” –George Carlin

 

[grafica]

unborn tomorrow dead yesterday
why fred about them if today be sweat

 

[Math Jeans]

"He has no enemies, but is intensly disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - 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." - Response from Winston Churchill

"Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee!" - Lady Astor to Winston Churchill
"Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it!" - Response from Winston Churchill

 

[sdeed]

Life is too short, you need to spend more time with the people you love

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The Clintons have dreamed of the day that a black man would be President; but not on their watch! - Carl Bernstein

 

[pitot-tube]

" If you didn't cure cancer today then you did nothing today"

CLINT EASTWOOD

 

[Ivan Seeking]

So you are going to send the Daleks to hell?

I told you he was good.

- Mickey

 

[_Mayday_]

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace"

- Jimi Hendrix

 

[Ivan Seeking]

South Carolina is not what the Greeks had in mind when they founded democracy.
- Mark Shields
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june08/sbfallon_01-18.html

 

[Math Jeans]

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

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I send a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

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

 

[SpitfireAce]

Why is it that Physicists always always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for papers, pencils, and waste paper baskets and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for waste paper baskets.
-University President

There is no such thing as a foolproof device, because fools are so ingenious

 

[falc39]

The stories speak to something inside us that wants to know how our world lives, that wants to make order of it and find some meaning. Myths fulfill that in a way that science and facts don't always do, because science and facts don't always give us meaning.

This is my all time favorite quote for the reason that the first time I read it, I seriously felt like a switch was suddenly turned on in my head. It's like I never realized that there was such a different way of seeing things in the world. My bookshelf now is incredibly different than what it was two or three years ago.

 

[turbo]

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

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I send a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

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

All three are great, though Groucho and Twain have a special place in my heart. If you haven't read Ambrose Bierce's "Devils Dictionary", you should. You seem to have an appreciation for the sardonic that matches mine.

 

[hypatia]

Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
Larry the Cable Guy

 

[hubertg]

"Mix religion and politics and you get politics"

 

[Andre]

Have we covered this one?

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

 

[euler_fan]

However, I'm not denying' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
George Eliot

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.”
Pierre-Simon Laplace

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

I promise I will never even THINK about going up in a tall building again.
John McClane (Die Hard)

 

[Andre]

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.” Pierre-Simon Laplace

For an alternative point of view:

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.

Josh Billings