Quotes
“Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of men.
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.”
- Bertrand Russell
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
To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never, in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony.
- William Henry Channing
“Oh, greatest of mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination. Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes. This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.”
-Calvin and Hobbes
There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
- Ray Bradbury
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
-Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
-Steven Weinberg
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
– William James
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
~Erich Fromm
I ask not for a lighter burden, but broader shoulders.
- Jewish Proverb
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
– Richard Feynman
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says “I’ll try again tomorrow.”
~Mary Anne Radmacher
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.
– Stephen Jay Gould
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
~T.S. Eliot
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. You just have to get people to stop reading them.
- Ray Bradbury
The jails are full of one million non-readers. We can’t let it happen again. If you allow another generation to grow up to be 12 years old…. without the ability to read, write, and think, we’re sunk. If they can’t read, if they can’t write, if they can’t think, they become criminals. We’ve already lost two generations. Unless we teach reading intensely and completely in kindergarten and first grade, the whole civilization goes to hell.
-Ray Bradbury
From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
– Ray Bradbury
Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made up or paid for in factories.
– Ray Bradbury
If you can’t read and write you can’t think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don’t know how to read and write. You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
– Ray Bradbury
That’s all for now. :]
