Favourite quotations

[dony]

La gloire n’est qu’une fausse monnaie contre laquelle nous sacrifions aux autres notre propre bonheur.
Witold Gombrowicz

Le principal usage que nous faisons de notre amour de la vérité est de nous persuader que ce que nous aimons est vrai.
Pierre Nicole

En peu de temps parfois on fait bien du chemin.
Molière

Ayez pitié. Voyez des âmes dans les choses.
Victor Hugo

Soyez le maître que vous voudriez avoir.
Victor Hugo

Plus on partage, plus on possède. Voilà le miracle.
Léonard Nimoy

Le droit des autres est une concession faite par notre sentiment de puissance au sentiment de puissance de ces autres.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Aucun être ne peut en sauver un autre. Il faut se sauver soi-même.
Herman Melville

Les émotions profondes nous rendent stériles.
Pierre Baillargeon

Je meurs chaque nuit pour ressusciter chaque matin.
Georges Bernanos

Le temps met tout en lumière.
Thalès

De deux douleurs simultanées, la plus forte obscurcit l’autre.
Hippocrate

Les Justes meurent malgré leur justesse, les méchants survivent malgré leur méchanceté.
Jacques Attali

Avant d’être une espérance pour l’avenir, la vie éternelle est, pour le présent, une exigence.
Henri de Lubac

Les amours dont l’objet n’est que beauté physique ne sont pas amour vrai.
Djalal al-dîn Rûmi

Le temps, qui fortifie les amitiés, affaiblit l’amour.
Jean de La Bruyère

L’amitié finit parfois en amour, mais rarement l’amour en amitié.
Charles Caleb Colton

Nous n’avons pas de futur. Pour tout le monde le futur parfait c’est la mort. Notre seul bien c’est le présent, la minute même; celle qui suit n’est déjà plus à nous.
Jean Giono

On ne se prépare pas à la mort, on se sépare de la vie.
Paul Claudel

La mort n’a aucun rapport avec nous ; car ce qui est dissous est insensible, et ce qui est insensible n’a aucun rapport avec nous.
Epicure

L’amitié est toujours profitable, l’amour est parfois nuisible.
Sénèque

Dans un couple, peut-être que l’important n’est pas de vouloir rendre l’autre heureux, c’est de se rendre heureux et d’offrir ce bonheur à l’autre.
Jaques Salomé

Je n’existe que dans la mesure où j’existe pour autrui, et, à la limite : être, c’est aimer.
Emmanuel Mounier

[Baltic tribes]

Otto von Bismarck

• Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
• People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
• Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
• When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice
• To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.
• I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.
• Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.

Sigmund Freud

• The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
• We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
• Time spent with cats is never wasted.
• A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
• Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
• We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Napoleon

• Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
• Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
• If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.
• I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.
• All religions have been made by men.
• You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

Werner Heisenberg

• What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Wernher von Braun
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

[Garrick]

Sigmund Freud

• Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Maybe Freud knew for recent findings:

5 Ways Cats Make You Healthier

http://www.rodalenews.com/health-benefits-cats

[Angela]

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

[Aberdeen]

"Let us praise then Creation Unfinished." from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

[FBS]

Maybe Freud knew for recent findings:

5 Ways Cats Make You Healthier

http://www.rodalenews.com/health-benefits-cats

If you do not get toxoplasmosis first :-(

[Angela]

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”

“Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

“Only the guilty are guilty. Their children are not."

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

“I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.”


Elie Wiesel.

[Angela]

One of the signatures in my profile is a quote from Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian nationalist and staunch Republican and Democrat.

This is it:

''God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.''

Speech, July 25, 1848, Milan, Italy.

This is an excellent paper.
http://ssai.interno.it/download/alle..._11_viroli.pdf

It is too long for me to translate the whole thing, but I will make a quick, poor attempt at a rough translation of some of the analysis of Mazzini's views.
For Mazzini, the defense of liberty is the supreme obligation. The moral obligations toward humanity come before any obligations to country. Before being citizens of a particular country, we are all human beings. National barriers cannot be invoked to justify an evil morality: the voices of suffering people can still be listened to...However great the cultural differences, the love of liberty makes understanding possible. The suffering of other people may not have the significance for us that it does for them, we can understand it only in part, but this doesn't impede us from participating in their struggle, if we have in our hearts the love of liberty. The love which sustains our commitment to the liberty of our own people sustains also the commitment to defend human dignity.

For Mazzini, there is no contradiction between national politics and international politics. Both must take their inspiration from the love of liberty. Mazzini judged intolerable the situation where the European powers, in the name of patriotism, venerated the liberty of their own countries as sacred, while they systematically violated the rights of other peoples. The love of country, unlike other passions, must proceed from the universal to the particular:

"Adoro la mia patria perché adoro la Patria;
la nostra libertà, perch'io credo nella Libertà;
i nostri diritti, perché credo nel Diritto"

I adore my country because I adore all countries, our liberty because I believe in Liberty, our rights because I believe in the Right.

For Mazzini, proper patriotism stimulates a sentiment of solidarity with all the victims of all oppression.

[Jago]

“I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.” - Oscar Wilde

[JinJin]

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart."(N.M.)

[JinJin]

I also like Oscar Wilde's quotations. There are lots of clever things in his work "Dorian Grey's picture"

[draj]

"A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent (which I cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place...." - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

[draj]

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Angela]

No one reads William Saroyan much anymore, but they should. I don't live up to this, but that's neither here nor there.

"I n the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."

[medic]

For me:
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

[tivali]

"A facillity for quotation covers for the absence of origional thought."

[Salento]

"If it's not right don't do it;
If it's not true don't say it"
-Marco Aurelio-

"Vivi e Lascia Vivere"
"Live and Let Live"
-?-


Sent from my iPhone using Eupedia Forum

[Jovialis]

“The ancient oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.” -Socrates

[rove]

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." Albert Einstein

"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race." Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." Albert Einstein


"I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." ecclesiastes (King Solomon)

[Miss Marple's nephew]

"The Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits."
Bernard Woolley

[Wheal]

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
~Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
~Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
~It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)
~She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

And after working in Wash D.C. for a few years...

George W. Bush (1946 - )
~You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

[ΠΑΝΑΞ]

.I remember when I was kid spend a lot of time to my godgathers store, a laboratory and shop of pastry leaves. My father was working there and I was helping him often, I remember sometimes doing also my homework for school there, it was a bench back to the warehouse of the prime materials which I used for my desk, at the mid-day siesta I was sleeping up on the sacks of flour... That's what fed my dreams... The smell of the flour, the sweat of the working men, their white dresses (aprons;), their smiles and the tunes of an old radio reciever back to the laboratoty.
At the front of the store was a hall for the customers, opposite of the big glass shop window and entrance of the store were some huge silver refrigerators with big handles and an amazing open-close sound, not similar but perfect like those of a "zippo" ligther. Left and right there were the counter benches, the walls both sides were full covered with -hundreds -handprinted quotations. The one wall had the ancient ones and the other the moderns...


From the ancient ones:
ΠΑΝ ΜΕΤΡΟΝ ΑΡΙΣΤΟΝ / PAN METRON ARISTON
Ι have the feeling won't need any translation, but I will give a shot metaphorically: It means to have the "perfect balance" or the "divine status" in short terms. Something like the sacred -Fibonacci- number, and that is the number Φ,φ (F,f) with a lot of extended approach. The main and common approach of the essential meaning is a balance beetween opposites, but nature (Pan) dont necessary finds stability beetween absolut opposites in dynamic but as well also, beetween "major" and "minor" opponents and issues in contrast. Actually they are three words medicine for every case, "all weather" ,and yes they sound perfect. (At least for me)


From the modern:
..."παραπονιόμουν που δεν είχα παπούτσια, εως ότου είδα κάποιον χωρίς πόδια".../
...."I was complaining that I had no shoes until I saw someone without feet"... (Menelaus Lountemis from his book " A kid counting the stars") It is a good rememberance not to be ;querolous; queasy; murmurers;


I also like my signature ΤΕΛΕΥΤΑ ΑΛΥΠΟΣ (Τelefta Alypos) which means: "end without sorrow" which dont necessary means "happy end" but defines at best -I consider- the spirit of stoicicism.

[ΠΑΝΑΞ]

“The ancient oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.” -Socrates

At least -we- know something... That Socrates dont know nothing.
Isn;t it funny; if not strange that a lot of people consider him as the foundation rock of western civilization?


A man which dont know..; While we -modern people- struggle to conviece others and us that we know something and usually well enough?
It is a good indication for how we percieve the past, I think...


An unconfirmed anecdote purports that Xanthippe was once so enraged with her husband that she took a chamber pot and poured it out over Socrates' head, which – according to the tale – the philosopher accepted with the allegory: “After thunder comes the rain.”



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe



An other anecdote from him is:
"When you find a good wife you are happy, but if you dont you are a philosopher"...

[Jovialis]

"If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."

-Genesis 4:7

[Dr Daniel Junglehart]

“Some secrets shouldn’t be known and if you know them you should never tell.”
No idea who said it but that sums up my family makes me wonder about the rest of the world.