41 posts tagged “quote of the day”
"Blinded by ignorance and self-absorption, humanity is destroying The Creation. There is still time to assume the stewardship of the natural world that we owe to future human generations."
-E.O. Wilson
"From my youth, I have been unorthodox in my faith. I could never reconcile the Calvinists' stern preachments that we are all of us, even radiant babes, sin-saturated. Nor could I bring myself to believe in a deity whose finger touched every man's slightest doing. To me, the divine is that immanence which is apparent in the great glories of Nature and in the small kindnesses of the human heart."
from March
by Geraldine Brooks
| "Given the amount of unjust suffering and unhappiness in the world, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes even perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared." -Dennis Prager |  |
"So she lived in a state of perpetual loss--the runner who gives her all to the race and always comes short. She couldn't give up the fight and couldn't quite win and so she was caught between the pride of battle and the shame of defeat. And in that state, in that place where rest was impossible and wanting led only to more sorrow, she bore me expecting that I, at least, would not fail.
What if you bet your whole life on a single wish, and lost?"
Yaas describes her mother in
Caspian Rain by Gina Nahai
This
is a beautifully written but terribly sad story of class struggle,
familial dysfunction, and crushing loneliness set in Tehran during the
decade preceding the Islamic Revolution.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
–H.L. Mencken
| "Oh the comfort, the inexpressible
comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts
nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are --
chaff and grain together -- certain that a faithful hand will take and
sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness
blow the rest away." -George Eliot |  |
"Love involves a peculiar, unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding."
-Diane Arbus
"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides."
-David Viscott
| "That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not." -James Kern Feibleman |  |
"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
-Laurens van der Post
