Favorite Quotations

I've gathered below some of my favorite quotations, presented in no particular order aside from some loose thematic clusters and juxtapositions. Please be aware that I've collected these over the years and have not tried in all cases to subject them to full scholarly fact-checking scrutiny, so I cannot always vouch for the accuracy of quotations I've run across in places other than original primary source locations. If you discover inaccuracies, I would be grateful if you would let me know.

(For an additional collection of quotations about history collected by Ferenc Szasz of the University of New Mexico, click here.)

"Only connect."
---E. M. Forster, Howard's End

"We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."
---Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

"The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history."
Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
---Edmund Burke

"We must be the change we want to see in the world."
---Gandhi

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
---Margaret Mead

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"
---George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Pt. I, Act 1, 1921
(a favorite quotation of Robert F. Kennedy, quoted by Edward M. Kennedy in his eulogy for his brother)

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."
"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember."
---Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

"At all times and in all places and under all circumstances,
give your attention to people and events one at a time;
Otherwise you will never give your attention to anything.
Be as honest as you know how;
Otherwise you will always rage against your own lies.
Curb your will to control events and people;
Otherwise you will always be unhappy.
Give freely to others;
Take freely what others give:
Otherwise you will give and receive nothing."
---Balto's Tonic, Dick Ringler, Mogador

"So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
---John F. Kennedy

"At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. . . . I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible. . . ."
---Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

"That, very roughly indeed, is the political, or theological, or politico-theological background to the play. But what of the social, or economic, or socio-economic, which we now think more important?
"The economy was very progressive, the religion was very reactionary. We say therefore that the collision was inevitable, setting Henry aside as a colorful accident. With Henry presumably we set as as accidents Catherine and Wolsey and Anne and More and Cranmer and Cromwell and the Lord Mayor of London and the man who cleaned his windows; setting aside indeed everyone as an accident, we say that the collision was inevitable. But that, on reflection, seems only to repeat that it happened. What is of interest is the way it happened, the way it was lived. For lived such collisions are. 'Religion' and 'economy' are abstractions which describe the way men live. Because men work we may speak of an economy, not the other way round. Because men worship we may speak of a religion, not the other way round. And when an economy collides with a religion it is living men who collide, nothing else (they collide with one another and within themselves)."
---Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, "Preface"

"Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life."
---Graham Swift, Waterland

"My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name."
---Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.... The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men."
---Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.... That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.... Is history taught in this spirit? it will be, once the concept of land as a community really penetrates our intellectual life."
---Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
---Muriel Rukeyser

"Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see."
---Paul Klee

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
---Francis Bacon

"...to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar."
---Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], describing the goal of Romanticism

"We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation."
---Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did."
---Lillian Hellman

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
---William Faulkner

“There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.”
---Eugene O'Neill

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
---Max Beerbohm

"Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making."
---Joseph J. Ellis

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please."
---Karl Marx

"What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies."
---Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic."
---Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"A considerable part of what we call natural landscape has the same kind of history. It is the product of human design and human labour, and in admiring it as natural it matters very much whether we suppress that fact of labour or acknowledge it. Some forms of this popular modern idea of nature seem to me to depend on a suppression of the history of human labour, and the fact that they are often in conflict with what is seen as the exploitation or destruction of nature may in the end be less important than the no less certain fact that they often confuse us about what nature and the natural are and might be."
---Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process."
---Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"Ideas of nature, but these are the projected ideas of men. And I think nothing much can be done, nothing much can even be said, until we are able to see the causes of this alienation of nature, this separation of nature from human activity, which I have been trying to describe. But these causes cannot be seen, in a practical way, by returning to any earlier stage of the idea. In reaction against our existing situation, many writers have created an idea of a rural past: perhaps innocent, as in the first mythology of the Golden Age; but even more organic, with man not separated from nature. The impulse is understandable, but quite apart from its element of fantasy--its placing of such a period can be shown to be continually recessive--it is a serious underestimate of the complexity of the problem. A separation between man and nature is not simply the product of modern industry or urbanism; it is a characteristic of many earlier kinds of organized labour, including rural labour.... The point that has really to be made about the separation between man and nature which is characteristic of so many modern ideas is that however hard this may be to express--the separation is a function of an increasing real interaction. It is easy to feel a limited unity on the basis of limited relationships, whether in animism, in monotheism, or in modern forms of pantheism. It is only when the real relations are extremely active, diverse, self‑conscious, and in effect continuous--as our relations with the physical world can be seen to be in our own day--that the separation of human nature from nature becomes really problematic."
---Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"

"Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions."
---Laurence Sterne

"It is our inward journey that leads us through time --- forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover. And most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge."
---Eudora Welty

"The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it--can we even remember it--until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it."
---Ursula Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

"To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea."
---Robert Penn Warren

"Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a “sense of place,” we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having “a sense of self” means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why."
---William Kittredge, The Nature of Generosity

"No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts."
---Wallace Stegner

"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."
---N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

"People need many different ways of reinforcing their bonds with the land to guarantee that their souls develop an ample capacity for affection and care. Coming to know and use a place responsibly is connected to slowly perceiving in an ordinary landscape a beauty that is more than scenic."
---Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons

"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are."
---Wendell Berry

"To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from."
---Carson McCullers

“It’s not down in any map; true places never are.” –
--- Herman Melville

"This is a history.
"But there is only one history. It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished. All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions--makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entireties, diffusing petty comfort or petty despair. The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and brief passage of time from that enormous tapestry. Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against the injustice, against the imposture.
"It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
"Look about you in all directions -- rise higher, rise higher! -- and see hills beyond hills, plains and rivers."
---Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day

"What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. “Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her."
---Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"At the outset, the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not end there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed 'souls,' or 'selves' or 'minds' to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees ... We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications ... And thus we arrive at a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as 'things in our own mind.' Apparently we had no mind of the sort required. The Subject is as empty as the Object. Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened."
---From C. S. Lewis's preface to D. E. Harding's Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth

"Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree."
---Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

"'And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,' said Carl softly. 'Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.'"
---Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

"The aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years' time by those who are now children and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life all my energies to it."
---Leo Tolstoy

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.... It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing."
---John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

"Time is the element in which we exist.... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it."
Joyce Carol Oates, Marya

"What is history but a fable agreed upon?"
---Napoleon

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
---Roy P. Basler

"There's history, and then there's the future, too. In between the two is the fascinating moment when the world changes."
---Margriet de Moor

"Historical sense and poetic sense should not, I think, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake."
---Robert Penn Warren

"In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw."
---William Maxwell

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."
---Oliver Cromwell

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing.
Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing.
Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little.
Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.
---Martin Niemöller

"When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
---John Maynard Keynes

"The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted."
---Ortega y Gasset

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question."
---Albert Camus

"There's nothing you can't get done in this town if you're willing to let someone else take the credit."
---Anonymous, referring to politics in Washington, D.C. (but broadly applicable everywhere)

"A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip."
---Anonymous

"Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or histories,--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about."
---Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

"Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live."
---John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (on novelists)

“The field cannot be well seen from within the field.”
---Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline."
---Barbara Kingsolver

"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world."
---Max Weber

"since feelings come first, who cares about the syntax of things?"
---e e cummings

"Recipes are not assembly manuals. Recipes are guides and suggestions for a process that is infinitely nuanced. Recipes are sheet music."
---Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking

"The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing." ("Le coeur à ses raisons que la raison ignore.")
---Blaise Pascal, Pensées

"Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything -- though it might have been a good thing if [that person had] also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough...that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept..."
---Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

"Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake."
---Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

"It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."
---Agnes Repplier

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
---Maya Angelou

"We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."
---John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity"

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
---Walter Lippmann

"The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire."
---Anatole France

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."
---William Arthur Ward

"To teach is to delight."
---Horace

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
---Henry Adams

Teachers open the door, but you enter by yourself.
---Anonymous

Vocation: "the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
---Frederick Buechner

"Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them."
---Werner Heisenberg

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."
---D. T. Suzuki

"Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse."
---African proverb

"One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
---Chinese proverb

"It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something."
---Ornette Coleman

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.” 
---Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Never waste a crisis."
---Unknown (a variant, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” is often attributed to the Stanford economist Paul Romer)

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a sniffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
---Albert Einstein

“The central project of environmental law has been to marry wonder to power.”
---A. Dan Tarlock, Environmental Law: Ethics or Science?

"Wonder is ignorance which is aware of itself as ignorance."
---Robert Harrison

"This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used."
---Henry David Thoreau

"Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear."
---Aldo Leopold, "The Farmer as a Conservationist"

"Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend."
---Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating"

"A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing."
---Kenneth Burke

"Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked."
---Oscar Wilde

"The whole of nature...is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive...."
---William Ralph Inge

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."
---C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

"Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world."
---Tony Judt

"When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life."
---Verlyn Klinkenborg

"I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief."
---Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins

Landscape "is not the land, but an idea of a land waiting to be settled by an alien dream."
---Jóhann Hjálmarsson

"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding landscapes but in having new eyes."
---Marcel Proust

"I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity."
--- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream."
---Henry David Thoreau

'Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a name. Once, at the beginning of time, when Segoy raised the isles of Earthsea from the ocean deeps, all things bore their own true names. And all doing of magic, all wizardry, hangs still upon the knowledge--the relearning, the remembering--of that true and ancient language of the Making. There are spells to learn, of course, ways to use the words; and one must know the consequences, too. But what a wizard spends his life at is finding out the names of things, and finding out how to find out the names of things."
---Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

"Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them--in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks."
---Walter Benjamin

"The Thames is liquid history."
---Sign over the bar in Trout Tavern, Wolvercote, outside Oxford

"Call Me Trim Tab"
---Buckminster Fuller's gravestone, Mt. Auburn Cemetery

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
---Louis Pasteur

"There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences."
---Robert Ingersoll

"When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false.... No one is offended at not seeing everything."
---Blaise Pascal

"Maturity consists in no longer being taken in by oneself."
---Kajean von Schalggenberg

“If a thing is not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.”
---Unknown

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both."
---Zen Buddhist text

"Yes, I suppose that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually--their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on--and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same--like old Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
---J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, from "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol" in The Two Towers

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever."
---Gandhi

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
And if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?"
---Hillel, Avoth, 1:14

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
---Martin Luther King

"O, it's enough to be on your way.
It's enough just to cover ground.
It's enough to be moving on.
Home: better build it behind your eyes.
Carry it in your heart,
Safe among your own."
---James Taylor, "It's Enough To Be On Your Way"