To be quoted can be either good or bad. Certain quotes can ruin a politican's career or get someone fired. But then there are others that enlighten the mind with a few concise words. The latter is what I'd like to focus on, although some will be more concise than others. And since this blog is mostly a homage to words, here are some more words to carry with you:
Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
~ Charles F. Kettering
We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
~Jawaharlal Nehru
It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel towards our distant goal.
~ Helen Keller
He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
~ Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
IF I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
~ Emily Dickinson
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
~ William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
An unexamined life is not worth living.
~ Socrates
[I]ts ugliness was so extreme that it verged on the beautiful. It had no charm or character, no lovingly wrought details to delude one into thinking it could ever become a home. It was a hospital for the living dead, a way station for the mentally afflicted, and to inhabit those blank, depersonalized interiors was to under- stand that the world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day.
~ Paul Auster, The Book Of Illusions
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
~ Khaled Hosseini, The Kiterunner
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees
. . .
I am part of all that I have met; yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.
. . .
Though we are not now that strength which in the old days moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are, one equal-temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he 's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he 's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
~ Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to make much of Time"
Thirsting for more? Check out
Lit for Life or
Movielines are Proverbs.
