Posts Tagged ‘George Bernard Shaw’

December 11th, 2011 Occasions No Comments »

Day Of The Dead (2nd Nov)

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again.
George Eliot, The Choir Invisible

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
William Penn

A human life is a story told by God.
Hans Christian Andersen

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.
Seneca

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch

I knew a man who once said, “death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.”
From the movie Gladiator

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
John Muir

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
Author Unknown

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground”

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Paradise -

I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
Yaitsu’s death poem, 1807

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci

There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
Lou Reed, “Magic and Loss”

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
Mark Twain

Someday I’ll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night’s dream.
Ryokan

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
George Bernard Shaw

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
Kahlil Gibran, from “The Prophet”

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
Marcel Proust

For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center.
Edwin Arnold

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From a headstone in Ireland

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
From the television show The Wonder Years

And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.
John Henry Newman

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident – It is as common as life.
Henry David Thoreau, 11 March 1842, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
J.K. Rowling

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.
Robert Ingersoll

 

August 17th, 2011 Occasions No Comments »

Fourth Of July (4th July)

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
Samuel F. Smith

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country!
Daniel Webster

And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.
Lee Greenwood

Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
Louis D. Brandeis

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
Erma Bombeck

Freedom is never free.
Author Unknown

We need an America with the wisdom of experience. But we must not let America grow old in spirit.
Hubert H. Humphrey

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.
James G. Blaine

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
Bill Clinton

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
Thomas Paine

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.
Woodrow Wilson

This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.
Elmer Davis

Where liberty is, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin

All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Rudyard Kipling

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
Robert J. McCracken

That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.
John Burroughs

Freedom’s natal day is here.
Fire the guns and shout for freedom,
See the flag above unfurled!
Hail the stars and stripes forever,
Dearest flag in all the world.
Florence A. Jones

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

A statistician made a few calculations and discovered that since the birth of our nation more lives had been lost in celebrating independence than in winning it.
Curtis Billings

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
George Washington

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
Woody Guthrie

Let freedom never perish in your hands.
Joseph Addison

My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
Thomas Jefferson

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic – have always blown on free men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
Thomas Macaulay

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
George Washington

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
Moshe Dayan

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.
Hamilton Fish

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln

In a chariot of light from the region of the day,
The Goddess of Liberty came
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
the plant she named Liberty Tree.
Thomas Paine

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
Dick Cheney

One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Martin Luther King Jr.

There, I guess King George will be able to read that.
John Hancock

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact – the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.
Adlai Stevenson

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus

It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism.
J. Horace McFarland

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
George Bernard Shaw

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
John Dickinson

November 23rd, 2010 S, Topics No Comments »

Silence

Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle

Silence is the unbearable repartee.
G. K. Chesterton

Speech is silver; silence is golden.
German proverb

Still waters run deep.
English proverb

Vessels never give so great a sound as when they are empty.
Bishop John Jewell

It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de la Bruyere

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.
Latin proverb

Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
James Russell Lowell

Be silent and safe – silence never betrays you.
John Boyle O’Reilly

He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life; but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction.
Bible

The rest is silence.
William Shakespeare

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
William Shakespeare

I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.
Syrus

How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
Antoine de St. Exupery

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley

The silent dog is the first to bite.
Old saying

We need a reason to speak, but none to keep silent.
Pierre Nicole

Silence is the unbearable repartee.
G. K. Chesterton

That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
Thomas Hardy

I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw

He has the gift of quiet.
John Le Carre

I’m exhausted from not talking.
Sam Goldwyn

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw

Better silent than stupid.
German proverb

It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent.
Jean de la Bruyere

I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.
Calvin Coolidge

One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears.
Dean Rusk

It is easier to talk than to hold one’s tongue.
Greek proverb

The pause – that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.
Mark Twain

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
Epictetus

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.
George Eliot

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Samuel Johnson

The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
William Hazlitt

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life’s nothingness.
Andre Maurois

Silence is deep as Eternity; speech, shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle

November 23rd, 2010 S, Topics No Comments »

Shame

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw

O shame! Where is they blush?
William Shakespeare

Shame is an ornament to the young; a disgrace to the old.
Aristotle

I count him lost, who is lost to shame.
Plautus

November 23rd, 2010 P, Topics No Comments »

Prison

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau

I know not whether laws be right, Or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.
Oscar Wilde

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.
Richard Lovelace

In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.
James Drummond Burns

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw

November 20th, 2010 F, Topics No Comments »

Fame and Celebrities

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
H. L. Mencken

Fame is a bee It has a song – It has a sting – Ah, too, it has a wing.
Emily Dickinson

A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services.
Daniel J. Boorstin

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw

He that hath the name to be an early riser may sleep till noon.
James Howell

Some day each of us will be famous for fifteen minutes.
Andy Warhol

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
William Hazlitt

When I pass my name in such large letters I blush, but at the same time instinctively raise my hat.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree

Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
Voltaire

Now when I bore people at a party, they think it’s their fault.
Henry Kissinger

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.
William McFee

Adlai Stevenson – a Henry James character in a Reader’s Digest world.
Cleveland Amory

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a great store of gold.
Bible

I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness, And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting.
William Shakespeare

Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes.
Lord Chesterfield

One of the drawbacks of Fame is that one can never escape from it.
Nellie Melba

Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will or not.
Sir George Savile

That sovereign of insufferables.
Ambrose Bierce

The only man who wasn’t spoilt by being lionized was Daniel.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Antonio Porchia

After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he had one.
Cato the Elder

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse.
Benjamin Franklin

All celebrated people lose dignity on a close view.
Napoleon Bonaparte

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other.
Daniel J. Boorstin

Before such a prodigious career, judgement is torn between blame and admiration.
Charles de Gaulle

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
Simeon Strunsky

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.
William Osier

To be somebody you must last.
Ruth Gordon

The world, like an accomplished hostess, pays most attention to those whom it will soonest forget.
John Churton Collins

Public opinion: a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for any one of us who is not content to be the average man.
Dean William R. Inge

Man’s attitude toward great qualities in others is often the same as toward high mountains – he admires them but he prefers to walk around them.
Moritz Saphir

All the fame I look for in life is to have lived it quietly.
Michel de Montaigne

September 21st, 2010 Occasions No Comments »

All Angels Day (29th Sep)

All God’s angels come to us disguised.
James Russell Lowell

God not only sends special angels into our lives, but sometimes He even sends them back again if we forget to take notes the first time!
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Insight is better than eyesight when it comes to seeing an angel.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

The guardian angels of life fly so high as to be beyond our sight, but they are always looking down upon us.
Jean Paul Richter

Thorns and stings
And those such things
Just make stronger
Our angel wings.
Terri Guillemets

Angels fly at light speed, because they are servants of the Light.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.
Jean Cocteau

Sometimes even the flight of an angel hits turbulence.
Astrid Alauda

We’re all kissed by angels but some of us never think to pucker.
Terri Guillemets

Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.
Josh Billings

Angels are all around us, all the time, in the very air we breathe.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuffed with down of angel’s wing.
Richard Crashaw

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw

An angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision.
St Thomas Aquinas

When babies look beyond you and giggle, maybe they’re seeing angels.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

If we were all like angels, the world would be a heavenly place.
Author Unknown

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If trouble hearing Angels song with thine ears, try listening with thy heart.
Terri Guillemets

Angels shine from without because their spirits are lit from within by the light of God.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Evangeline”

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I’m no angel, but I’ve spread my wings a bit.
Mae West

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.
Lydia M. Child

Angels are direct creations of God, each one a unique Master’s piece.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels deliver Fate to our doorstep – and anywhere else it is needed.
Jessi Lane Adams

If one looks closely enough, one can see angels in every piece of art.
Terri Guillemets

Angels are quite ample cause to cry…
Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
Richard Lovelace

You’ll meet more angels on a winding path than on a straight one.
Terri Guillemets

Children often have imaginary playmates. I suspect that half of them are really their guardian angels.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Richard Purdy Wilbur

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle

An angel lost his wing,
Crooked he did fly.
Terri Guillemets

Angels can fly because they carry no burdens.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

I guess I have never really doubted that we are all born to our guardian angel.
Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo

Angels are messengers, but sometimes we misunderstand their language.
Linda Solegato

Whether we are filled with joy or grief, our angels are close to us, speaking to our hearts of God’s love.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels can fly directly into the heart of the matter.
Author Unknown

O welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!
John Milton, Comus

If angels rarely appear, it’s because we all too often mistake the medium for the Message.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Sometimes what we believe as coincidence is really just getting ourselves caught in an angel booby trap.
Grey Livingston

Ever felt an angel’s breath in the gentle breeze? A teardrop in the falling rain? Hear a whisper amongst the rustle of leaves? Or been kissed by a lone snowflake? Nature is an angel’s favorite hiding place.
Carrie Latet

Angels are never too distant to hear you.
Author Unknown

Let us not be justices of the peace, but angels of peace.
Saint Theresa of Lisieux

When our mortal eyes close on this world for the last time, our angels open our spiritual eyes and escort us personally before the face of God.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels sail back to God on the sea of joy.
Terri Guillemets

Have you ever seen a flower down
Sometimes angels skip around
And in their blissful state of glee
Bump into a daisy or sweet pea.
Jessi Lane Adams

If you can’t hear the angels, try quieting the static of worry.
Terri Guillemets

A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.
Author Unknown

The magnitude of life is overwhelming. Angels are here to help us take it peace by peace.
Levende Waters

While we are sleeping, angels have conversations with our souls.
Author Unknown

How wonderful it must be to speak the language of the angels, with no words for hate and a million words for love!
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels, pixies, faerie dust
Treading love and living lust.
Jaesse Tyler

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels.
Author Unknown

When we worship God, our angels add their prayers and turn our single voices into hundred-part harmony.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Anyone can be an angel.
Author Unknown

The angels are always near to those who are grieving, to whisper to them that their loved ones are safe in the hand of God.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?
Tom Waits, “Mr Siegal,” Heartattack and Vine (Thanks, Paula)

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Elliot

The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.
G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”

The Angels were all singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon
Or curb a runaway young star or two.
Lord Byron

I wear a coat of angels’ breath and warm myself with His love.
Terri Guillemets

Be an angel to someone else whenever you can, as a way of thanking God for the help your angel has given you.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone.
William Blake

Angels have no philosophy but love.
Terri Guillemets

It is not known precisely where angels dwell – whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
Voltaire

Pay attention to your dreams – God’s angels often speak directly to our hearts when we are asleep.
Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God.
Meister Eckhart

Angels descending, bring from above,
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
Fanny J. Crosby

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
Luciano de Crescenzo

Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design.Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

We trust in plumed procession
For such the angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And uniforms of Snow.
Emily Dickinson

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
John Keats

September 20th, 2010 Occasions No Comments »

Chinese Moon Festival (12th Sep)

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody
Mark Twain

The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand.
Frederic Lawrence Knowles

I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum
George Bernard Shaw

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Mark Twain

Malaysians are not idiots or imbeciles,
Chandra Muzaffar

When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger
Chinese Proverbs

I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it
Albert Einstein

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
Buddha

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark – that is critical genius.
Billy Wilder

Lotteries, a tax upon imbeciles
Camillo di Cavour

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
Olive Schreiner

I’m standing on the moon, with nothing left to do, with a lonely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you

See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…we need silence to be able to touch souls.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Man is now able to soar into outer space and reach up to the moon; but he is not moral enough to live at peace with his neighbor!
Sri Sathya Sai Baba

August 5th, 2010 F, Topics No Comments »

Fools and Foolishness

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.
Charles Lamb

A busy fool is fitter to be shut up than a downright madman.
George, Lord Halifax

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell ‘em.
Louis Armstrong

A fellow who is always declaring he’s no fool usually has his suspicions.
Wilson Mizner

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Karl Kraus

Every inch that is not fool is rogue.
John Dryden

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
Anonymous

He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.
La Rochefoucauld

The poor schlemiel is a man who falls on his back and breaks his nose.
Jewish proverb

None but a fool worries about things he cannot influence.
Samuel Johnson

Nature never makes any blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.
Josh Billings

Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride a gallop.
Robert Burton

It is said that a wise man who stands firm is a statesman, and a foolish man who stands firm is a catastrophe.
Adlai Stevenson

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority for any town?
Mark Twain

For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Who loves not women, wine and song, Remains a fool his whole life long.
Martin Luther

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no chance for old fools.
Cree Indian proverb

A fool’s head never whitens.
Old saying

For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.
Bible

Many have been the wise speeches of fools, though not so many as the foolish speeches of wise men.
Thomas Fuller

Men trip not on mountains, they stumble on stones.
Old saying

There are bearded fools.
Old saying

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
Elbert Hubbard

Nothing is more like a wise man than a fool who holds his tongue.
St. Francis de Sales

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France

There are two kinds of fools: one says, ‘This is old, therefore it is good’; the other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’
Dean William R. Inge

A fool must now and then be right by chance.
William Cowper

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain

July 15th, 2010 Occasions No Comments »

Happy Fourth of July (4th July)

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
Robert J. McCracken

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.
Hamilton Fish

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
Author Unknown

I love my freedom. I love my America.
Jessi Lane Adams

Without freedom, no one really has a name.
Milton Acorda

Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin

All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, “Maxims: Liberty and Equality,” 1905

It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism.
J. Horace McFarland

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic – have always blown on free men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.
James G. Blaine

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
Thomas Macaulay

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
John Dickinson

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner

My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
Thomas Jefferson

What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom “to” and freedom “from.”
Marilyn vos Savant, in Parade

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
Paul Sweeney

From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.
Samuel F. Smith, “America”

We need an America with the wisdom of experience. But we must not let America grow old in spirit.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
Moshe Dayan

And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.
Lee Greenwood

It is sweet to serve one’s country by deeds, and it is not absurd to serve her by words.
Sallust

Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
Louis D. Brandeis

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
Author unknown, sometimes attributed to M. Grundler

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
George Bernard Shaw

America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact – the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.
Adlai Stevenson

May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country!
Daniel Webster

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine

My patriotic heart beats red, white, and blue.
Author Unknown

Freedom is not enough.
Lyndon B. Johnson

We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
Ricardo Flores Magon, speech, 31 May 1914

Freedom is never free.
Author Unknown

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
William J. Clinton

This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.
Lyndon B. Johnson

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.
John Burroughs, Journal

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
Thomas Paine

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.
Elmer Davis

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.
Woodrow Wilson

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Let freedom never perish in your hands.
Joseph Addison

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
Erma Bombeck

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

A statistician made a few calculations and discovered that since the birth of our nation more lives had been lost in celebrating independence than in winning it.
Curtis Billings

Freedom’s natal day is here.
Fire the guns and shout for freedom,
See the flag above unfurled!
Hail the stars and stripes forever,
Dearest flag in all the world.
Florence A. Jones