Favourite quotations

I would like to quote an eminent J-refian, our own Nana007, who has shared with us the valuable insight that:

"There is a time in every man's life when he gets tired of PVC, bondage gear, dresses, and makeup".

Now that is worth remembering, guys... and girls. :note:
 
Alice Walker:

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actual fools.

"I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have."

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Zora Neale Hurston:

No matter how far a person can go to the horizon it still way beyond you.

Research is formalized curiosity, it's poking and prying with a purpose.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Anne Rice:

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
 
One of my favorite quotes is actually from a video game believe it or not. I've altered it a bit in the past, but it pretty much has the same meaning to me regardless. Here is the original quote:

"There is one lesson that I had taken from Gontriono, trust no one, but never forget those who put their trust in you. Forget the past I'll never find peace there. So I'll just find justice myself, and I'll choose the truth that I like."

Doc :wave:
 
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
- John Milton (1608-1674) Areopagitica.

In short - put up or shut up.
 
Wow, there a some great ones here. Some of my favorites are:

The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights. -J Paul Getty

We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. -Cullen Hightower.

Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in. - Evan Davis

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car - Evan Davis

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. - Will Rogers

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. - Will Rogers

People say common sense will fix things, but sense has not always been common - Chuck D

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else? - James Thurber

Forecasting is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. -Edgar R. Fiedler

As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought for the other fellow. He could be plotting something. - Hagar the Horrible
 
Here's a gloomy one .... but classic ...

"... ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee ...!" (John Donne)

:erm:

?W????
 
Sensuikan San said:
Here's a gloomy one .... but classic ...

"... ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee ...!" (John Donne)
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but it loses it`s charm without "No man is an Island...." :blush:
 
Agreed!

(..... but that was gonna make it a tad long ....!):)

?W????
 
"It is good to be wise, but not too wise--for a wise man's heart is seldom glad." -- The Elder Edda. (Basicly the viking equivalent of the bible)

"Being human is a mistake we all have to make in order to learn from it in the next life" -- me

And my personal favorite:

"A facillity for quotation covers for the absence of origional thought."
 
Douglas Adams was a great bloke. Not only was he one of the funniest people who ever lived, he could be quite profound at times too. Even funny and profound at the same time. :cool:

  • 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. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
  • The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful.
  • I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
  • I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instictively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!"

    (I actually think that's true. I get vertigo, and that's exactly how it feels to me - I'm afraid that I won't be able to stop myself from jumping.)
  • If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

Please click the link, or I will go on forever!
 
Haha, those are still awesome even all these years later--I really need to go back and read the rest of the books.

My personal favorites?

  • 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.

  • It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

  • So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!"

  • If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

    And of course:
  • "So long and thanks for all the fish!" :D
 
I have one, I can't remember where it's from, but I'll never forget it, because my family has been touched with this kind of thing...

"Don't complain of growing old ~ it is a privilege denied to many."
 
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
  • "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
  • "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...."

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
  • Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
  • What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and always will be thousands of princes, but there is only one Beethoven.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)
  • Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
  • You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
  • "Life has no meaning a priori ?c It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."
 
Just one I heard today that I found quite funny : "Helping people is never so rewarding than when it's in your own self-interest."
 
"I love humanity, it's people I can't stand"

I think that this quotation is attributed to more than one person. I personally told myself something very similar many times before I heard it on TV.
 
"It is a beautiful world with people blissfully living in abject ignorance."

Travel memoirs, Maciamo
 
Supervin said:
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." - LP Hartley, 1953
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I suppose that this LP Hartley is American. This just sounds so typically American. When I go to France or Luxembourg, it doesn:t feel like a foreign country at all. Things are done pretty much the same way. I guess that Scandinavians have the same feeling among them.
 
Maciamo said:
I suppose that this LP Hartley is American. This just sounds so typically American. When I go to France or Luxembourg, it doesn:t feel like a foreign country at all. Things are done pretty much the same way. I guess that Scandinavians have the same feeling among them.
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LP Hartley's British.

I think you were quick to jump the gun there. The quote refers to the past being like a foreign country. The past can refer to one's own past or in generic terms which is opposed to the present and future.
 
Supervin said:
LP Hartley's British.
I think you were quick to jump the gun there. The quote refers to the past being like a foreign country. The past can refer to one's own past or in generic terms which is opposed to the present and future.
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I understand that the past can seem "foreign". I just disagreed with the part "they do things differently [in foreign countries]", hence my examples of foreign countries where culture is very similar. I could also have given examples of a same country where people "do things differently" (=have a different culture) depending on the region : Belgium (Flanders vs Wallonia), the UK (England isn't Scotland not Northern Ireland !), India (can't compare Kerala and Sikkhim), China (Tibet is hardly similar to Hong Kong)... As a Brit, Hartley ought to have known better.
 
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