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

[SW VandeCarr]

Abraham Lincoln responding to his opponent who called him "two faced" during a debate:

"If I had two faces, do you think I'd be wearing this one?".

Lincoln told a story about a woman he met while out walking who said he was the homliest (read "ugliest") man she'd ever met. Lincoln apologized but said he really couldn't do anything about it. The woman said she understood but told him he really should stay inside.

 

[mikelepore]

"Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

Karl Marx, _Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_, Chapter 7

 

[jobyts]

"God didn't mean for women to have birth control or abortions because it ain't natural but God makes an exception for our Viagra." ~ GOP Sentiments

 

[Whovian]

"He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing. The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and dæmons. Why he had run away from us and hid. He was being kind. He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be imprisoned there forever. He still visits my sister. Once a year. Every year. I wonder if one day he may forgive her. But there she is. He trapped her in a mirror. Every mirror. If you ever look at your reflection and see something move behind you, just for a second, that's her. That's always her. As for me, I was suspended in time. And the Doctor put me to work, standing over the fields of England as their protector. We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure we did."

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Salmon Rushdie was describing his reaction when informed by telephone that the supreme leader of Iran had just issued a kill order against him. He said the first thing he did was run downstairs and lock the front door!

 

[SpaceDreamer]

"It is the duty of children to wait on elders, and not the elders on children." - African Proverb

"Television to brainwash us all and the Internet to eliminate any last resistance." - Paul Carvel

"You are not here to merely make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." - Woodrow Wilson

"You got to dream, you got to protect it. People can't do something themselves, they want to tell you, you can't do it. If you want something, go get it. Period." - Will Smith in 'Pursuit of Happyness'

 

[SpaceDreamer]

And somewhat more than a quote, but my favorite and in my opinion a humbling one:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there*– on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity*– in all this vastness*– there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
—Carl Sagan,*Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997

 

[FreeMitya]

Ough, I've got a myriad favourite quotes. Here are a few that come to mind:

"This feather stirs; she lives. If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt." - King Lear.

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet

"For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!" And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same." - The Grand Inquisitor (on the nature of man), from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

"The Reason of your unreasonable Usage of my Reason, does so enfeeble my Reason, that I have Reason to expostulate with your beauty." - from Don Quixote.

"O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm." - Hart Crane, Atlantis.

"O, thou hast damnable iteration and art indeed able
to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon
me, Hal; God forgive thee for it! Before I knew
thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man
should speak truly, little better than one of the
wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give
it over: by the Lord, and I do not, I am a villain:
I'll be damned for never a king's son in
Christendom." - Sir John Falstaff.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

 

[Astronuc]

Everyone believes an experiment…except the guy who ran it
And no one believes a calculation…except the guy who made it.

B. L. Smith, Technical Meeting on Application of CFD for NPP Design and Safety Analysis, Dec. 2010

 

[Borek]

Statistics are like a bikini - they pretend to show everything, hiding the really important bits.

 

[Borek]

In God we trust. All others must bring data.

 

[Charmar]

"Getting the 'right' answer is important, but understanding how to solve the problem (i.e. how you get the right answer) is just as important, if not more so."
-Astronuc
I have used this a number of times since I first noticed it.

 

[OmCheeto]

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

 

[ImaLooser]

It was on fire when I lay down on it. -- Robert Fulghum

 

[OmCheeto]

Man, sometimes God really sucks.

Glenn Beck

 

[Vorde]

Time flies like an arrow; fruit files like a banana.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what." - Mitt Romney

Actually, it's 50.5%.

 

[Borg]

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what." - Mitt Romney

Actually, it's 50.5%.

Where do you get this stuff?

 

[drizzle]

LOL Jimmy, indeed a favorite quote

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll be drinking beer for the rest of his life.

 

[davenn]

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll be drinking beer for the rest of his life.

thats so bad, haha, destroying a wonderful saying
but a lot of truth in there ;)

Dave

 

[Astronuc]

Common sense seems commonly elusive.

 

[ImaLooser]

Perspicuity obviates perspicacity.

 

[Cosmic Reign]

Bill Maher: "I'm the last of my guy friends to have never gotten married, and their wives — they don't want them playing with me. I'm like the escaped slave — I bring news of freedom."

 

[OmCheeto]

That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.

--------------------------
Born Harry Heine
13 December 1797
Düsseldorf
Died 17 February 1856 (aged 58)
Paris, France
Occupation Poet, essayist, journalist, literary critic
Nationality German
Alma mater Bonn, Berlin, Göttingen

 

[jobyts]

Tasty Cosmos, Milky Way bar, MoonPie, Eclipse gum, Orbit gum, Sunkist, Celestial Seasonings, Mars bar. No food named Uranus. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

... and of course she promptly loved him, or thought she did, which amounts to the same thing. - Jack London in Martin Eden.

 

[mheslep]

It's better to burn out than to fade way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvnq_W0i3Bs

 

[dx]

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.

- Albert Einstein

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I would give my right arm to be ambidextrous