--Erma Bombeck
"The Universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
--Eden Phillpots
"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved piece, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming - -
'WOW-WHAT A RIDE!'"
--Unknown
"Use what talents you possess--the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."
--Henry Jackson Van Dyke
"It's all a gift... remember the dark side of any unearned blessing, that it can be taken away as arbitrarily as it arrived."
--Jon Caroll
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
--Paul Erdos
"1st: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: yet, if I'm only for me, what am I? Nothing! 3rd: If not now, when? Once more: Unless constructive-selfish I work hard... perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help perfect me!!"
--Dr. Bronner
"People never grow up. Their bodies just wear out from use by the child inside."
--Sue Hodges
"The problem is, most people never take the time to define true happiness to themselves, and realize that it means living a good, noble, honest life, being in accordance with all actions taken, and having an abundance of love."
--Tennille Christensen
"You are engineer. Be proud"
--Than Soe (said to me when he was my mentor)
"When you come to understand the mind and soul of a runner, you'll realize it's not about the miles logged, the races won or lost. It's the passion that drives us. Passion is running and running is passion. They are inseparable. And if you have that passion, whether it's to run around the block or around the town, you have the power to go the distance."
--Gail Waesche Kislevitz
"You don't run against a bloody stop watch, do you hear? A runner runs against himself, against the best that's in him. Not against a dead thing of wheels and pulleys. That's the way to be great, running against yourself. Against all the rotten mess in the world. Against God, if you're good enough."
--Bill Persons
"One is oneself a fine consequence."
--Henry James
"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
"I am only one; but still, I am one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something; I will not refuse to do something I can do."
-Helen Keller
"It doesn't take a lot of education to check things out. All it takes is access to resources and a minor distrust of everyone else on the planet and a feeling that the may be trying to put something over on you."
-Kary Mullis
"Life has such funny ways!"
--Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Sewanee
"Good things happen elsewhere, but when it's here, you're already here."
--Jon Carroll
"Be Kind,
--Toni Tripp
"I've learned how to live without knowing. I don't have to be sure I'm succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don't know what I'm doing. I'm delighted with the width of the world!"
--Richard Feynman
"Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world, intellectually as much as physically, so that we may at last hold these halves of the world together by the same values. For this is the lesson of science, that the concept is more profound than its laws, and the act of judging more critical than the judgment."
--J. Bronowski
"Advanced [Mathematical] Study is Like Making Love! It is Best When Shared!... But it's Not as Though You Can't Do a Perfectly Splendid Job All By Yourself!"
--Michael Hugh Knowles
"The difference between the scientist and the engineer is that the former seeks what is True, and the latter what is Good."
--John Horgan
"I admire the beauty and power of mathematics: there are ingenuity and intricacy in tactical maneuvers, and breathtaking sweeps in strategic campaigns. And, of course, miracle of miracles, some concepts in mathematics turn out to provide the fundamental structures that govern the physical universe!"
-- C.N. Yang
"Alice laughed: 'There's no use trying,' she said; 'one can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"
--Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
--Howard Aiken
"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
--Steven Wright
"We all deserve what measure of grace we can give each other."
--Jon Carroll
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
--Henry David Thoreau
"If we are to be humans, hope is always an obligation."
--Jon Caroll
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."
--Donald Foster
...I'm truly sorry man's dominion
--Robert Burns, 1785
"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
--Buckminster Fuller
"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Prove to me that you love me by letting me feed you."
--Toni Tripp
"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's why I eat several"
--Gabriel Behymer
"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."
--Francois-Auguste Rodin, when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues
"Who ordered that?"
--I. I. Rabi, on the discovery of muons during the search for mesons
"Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write."
--Barbara Kingsolver
"You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things... You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals."
--Sir Edmund Hillary
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
--Albert Einstein
"Our life is a collection of moments. Nothing more.
"Who we are is also determined by what we do in each of those moments. Decide who you would be and then act in each moment as you would have yourself act.
"We have no guarantee of tomorrow. Just right now. If we commit to each moment and live it hard whether we are laughing, crying, working or playing. One day we will fondly remember a moment and realize it was years ago. We will look back and see years well lived.
"There are no big issues, they don't fit in each little moment. Big issues are really just sums of little issues.
"If we attack each infinitesmal time increment of our life, the integral will be simple and beautiful. If we stay true to the same ideals in doing so, it will be smooth. If we try to attack the integral as a whole, it is beyond our comprehension, since we are limited to the now, and we will fail.".
--Tennille Christensen
"I'll never breed because I understand that I'd be a psychotic parent. Too bad some of the crazed teen mothers I've watched cussing out their kids couldn't figure out the same."
--Neva Chonin
"If you're like my son Patrick, you want to know what you're for, what your special gifts are. He makes me think of my dog Cody. Cody snaps at our heels, trying to get us to turn. He doesn't know why he does that because he doesn't know he's a sheepdog, born to herd sheep. He doesn't know what he's for. I bet he will find out in a hurry if we ever come across some sheep.
"Watch for your sheep."
--Adair Lara
"Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man said, 'I am going to tell you something that you will never forget.' And then he said, 'To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.'
"And so it is with science. In a way it is a key to the gates of heaven, and the same key opens the gates of hell, and we do not have any instructions as to which is which gate. Shall we throw away the key and never have a way to enter the gates of heaven? Or shall we struggle with he problem of which is the best way to use the key? That is, of course a very serious question, but I think that we cannot deny the value of the key to the gates of heaven."
--Richard P. Feynman
"For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught -- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you anything."
--Unknown
"Quantum particles: the dreams that stuff is made of."
--Unknown
"You gotta find your gorgeous reminders where you can."
--Mark Morford
Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
--Shel Silverstein
If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you! If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, and yet make allowance for their doubting too! If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don't deal in lies! 0r being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise! if you can dream and not make dreams your master! If you can think and not make thoughts your aim! If you can meet with triumph or disaster and treat those two imposters just the same! If you can bear to hear the full-truth you have spoken twisted by crooks to make a trap for fools! Or watch the things that you have given your life to broken, and stoop to build them up again with worn out tools! If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it at one turn of pitch or toss! And lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss! If you can force your heart, your nerve, your sinew, to serve you long after they are gone! And so hold on although there is nothing left within you except that voice that says to them "Hold on! Hold on!" If you can talk to crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings and not lose that common touch! If neither loving friend nor enemy can hurl you; it all men count with you, but none too much!
--Dr. Bronner
Priests grope and CFOs snicker and pasty vice presidents beef up their military portfolios, ex-husbands split and churches fail and trust seems at an all-time low. So then, the simple but often incredibly difficult solution: Trust yourself.
Trust that you know how to think and grow and make peace and change and really pray. And if something pops up like hey I think I need to go into the woods and marry myself or toss some dreams into a volcano, catapult a stick-figure waitress into the sea or take a blowtorch to the ex-wife's old Crock Pot, then you do it. And you keep doing it.
It's just that simple.
--Mark Morford
For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair... [The] real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know'it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.
It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work'; a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it!
--Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present
Desiderata
Go placidy amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far
as
possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and
clearly;
and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and
aggressive persons; they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be
greater
and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested
in
your own career, however humble; it is a real possesion in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery, but let this not
blind you to
what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be
yourself. Espescially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of
all aridity
and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully
surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with
dark
imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be
gentle
with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a
right to
be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labours and
aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery
and
broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
--Max Ehrmann