Quotes – Page 2 – A Pondering Mind

“Who lies for you will lie against you.” ~ John Locke

Speak Your Mind

“I’d turn off the internet for a month and make us actually talk to each other, and be responsible for your opinions and not be able to hide behind the anonymity of the cyber-wall to speak your mind. To actually have to face people and see their reactions and discuss it – actually discuss it. It won’t happen. Unless the grid goes down.”

~ John Larroquette

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“February dawn — frost on the path Where I paced all winter.” ~ Jack Kerouac

February

“While it is February one can taste the full joys of anticipation. Spring stands at the gate with her finger on the latch.”

~ Patience Strong

Tired Of Waiting

“I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”

~ Langston Hughes

Cell Phones

“Apparently we love our own cell phones but we hate everyone else’s.”

~ Joe Bob Briggs, Film critic

Three Phobias

“I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”

~ Tallulah Bankhead

“The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.” ~Al Neuharth

“Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.” ~Anton Chekhov

“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” ~Robert Frost

Promises To Keep

“But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

~ Robert Frost

“I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.” ~ Sara Teasdale

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.” ~Jeffrey Eugenides

“If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” ~Anatole France

Philosophy is common sense with big words. ~James Madison

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

Watch Your Thoughts

“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habit.”

~ Laozi

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ~ Aristotle

Philosophical Animal

“It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal… one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.”

~ Theophile Gautier

Philosophical Questions

“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”

~ Susanne Katherina Langer

Fact And Opinion

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

~ Marcus Aurelius

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles. ~Stephen Covey

“However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.” ~ George Orwell

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” ~ Albert Camus

“Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.” ~ Plato

Reality Is

“Reality is the #1 cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it”

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Hating People

“Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.”

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.” ~Rudyard Kipling

The Opposite Of Love

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

~ Elie Wiesel

“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman

“If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?” ~James Madison

“Leadership Is A Privilege

“Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.”

~ Mwai Kibaki

Merely Observing

“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.”

~ T. S. Eliot

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” ~Winston Churchill

Destination

“The journey, Not the destination matters.”

~ T. S. Eliot

A Mother’s Love

“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”

~ Agatha Christie

“Books are a habit-forming drug.” ~ Agatha Christie

“If you chase two rabbits,you catch none.” ~ Confucius

Are We Human

“A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now that’s a question.”

~ Neil Gaiman

To Be A Philosopher

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

“Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don’t look for anything else.” ~Bertrand Russell

“Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.” ~ John Barrymore

“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” ~ J. D. Salinger

Implementing Ideas

“You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

~ Shirley Chisholm

“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” ~ Jimi Hendrix

“We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” ~ Patti Smith

The Wonder Remains

“Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”

~ Alfred North Whitehead

“There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.” ~Alfred North Whitehead

To think is to differ. ~Clarence Darrow

Living In The Past

“Too many people live too much in the past. The past must be a springboard, not a sofa.”

~ Harold MacMillan

“A person is able to understand only when he solves the problem by himself.” ~Peter Deunov

Peter Deunov, Bulgarian Philosopher – July 11, 1864 – December 27, 1944

The World We See

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

~ William James

Time Heals

“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

~ Rose Kennedy

Bad Poetry

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Greatest Adventure

“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”

~ J. R. R. Tolkien

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. ~Jacques Yves Cousteau

We Need To Write

“We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what’s hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.”

~Sandra Cisneros

Natural Healing Force

“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your sickness.”

~ Hippocrates

“Why should things be easy to understand?” ~ Thomas Pynchon

Novels Are Fictions

“Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.”

~ Paul Auster

Read What You Want To Read

“Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”

~ Joyce Carol Oates

“The death of rock was not a natural death. Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered.” ~Gene Simmons

“Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always.” ~Dante Alighieri

Learning never exhausts the mind. ~Leonardo da Vinci

“You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.” ~ Babe Ruth

“It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.” ~ Claude Monet

Leadership

“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”

~ Rosalynn Carter

Three Friends

“We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.”

~ Michelle Obama

The Wise Man

“The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.”

~ Claude Levi-Strauss

We think to much and feel to little. ~Charlie Chaplin

“Be comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds.” ~Louisa May Alcott

“I’m only myself when I have a guitar in my hands.” ~George Harrison

Nothing In Nature

“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.”

~ Baruch Spinoza

“Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.” ~ Vernon Howard

Climate Change

We have to face the reality of climate change. It is arguably the biggest threat we are facing today.

~William Hague

Sports and politics don’t mix. ~Eric Heiden

Endangered Species

What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing.

~Jay Inslee

“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” ~Aldous Huxley

Who You Are

“To me, clothing is a form of self-expression – there are hints about who you are in what you wear.”

~ Marc Jacobs

Human Conception

“Life is life – whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man’s own advantage.”

~ Sri Aurobindo

Human Rights

“The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.”

~ Julian Bond

The Rule of Fools

“If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”

~ Plato

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. ~Ann Landers

Equal Right

“All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”

~ John Locke