Archives for August 2024

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
—Blaise Cendrars (Swiss Poet, Writer)

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage—he won’t encounter many rivals.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Philosopher, Physicist)

We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)

Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.
—Arabic Proverb

Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
—Marva Collins (American Educator)

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
—Jodi Picoult (American Novelist)

They… threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this—animated, but collateral.
—Rose Macaulay (British Author)

Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience.
—Paul Boese

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
—Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British Philosopher)

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

In ancient times, do you think that there was not the ignorant, and the shallow minded? And why after all should you embrace so fondly a carcass of dead thoughts. Live in the present and shape the future, do not be casting lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return.
—Subramanya Bharathi (Indian Tamil Poet)

Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
—Dan Millman (American Children’s Books Writer)

Quarrels often arise in marriages when the bridal gifts are excessive.
—Ausonius (Latin Poet, Rhetorician)

Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.
—Russell Banks (American Author)

The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one’s neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out.
—John Shelby Spong (American Episcopal Bishop)

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it… it’s just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)

Lift up your worries and ask for grace to get through the rest of the day.
—Sarah Ban Breathnach (American Self-help Author)

Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
—Dwight L. Moody (Christian Religious Leader)

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.
—Maxwell Maltz (American Surgeon)

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)