Favorite Quotes

"Those who are completely unused to inquiry are, in the first exercise of their mind, blinded and dazed and straight-way leave off the inquiry from mental fatigue and an incapacity that is no less than [the fatigue] of those who enter races without being accustomed to them. But the man who is accustomed to inquiry tries every possible loophole as he conducts his search and turns in every direction; and, so far from giving up the inquiry in the space of a day, he does not cease his search throughout his life. Directing his attention to one idea after another that is germane to what is being investigated, he presses on until he arrives at his goal."     Galen of Pergamum (c. 129-199), On Habits.
From The Aristotle Adventure, by Burgess Laughlin.
"The world is solid, tangible, real. It is open to human understanding." Linda Mann
 "There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it. He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends or to accomplish a useful object. If he can serve you, he will do so; if he cannot, he will say so without keeping you in needless suspense, or laying you under pretended obligations. The applying to him in any laudable undertaking is not like stirring 'a dish of skimmed milk.' There is stuff in him, and it is of the right practicable sort. He is not all his life at hawk-and-buzzard whether he shall be a Whig or a Tory, a friend or a foe, a knave or a fool; but thinks that life is short, and that there is no time to play fantastic tricks in it, to tamper with principles, or trifle with individual feelings.  If he gives you a character, he does not add a damning clause to it: he does not pick holes in you lest others should, or anticipate objections lest he should be thought to be blinded by a childish partiality. His object is to serve you; and not to play the game into your enemies' hands."
William Hazlitt

"We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?"
Charles Morse, The Edge by David Mamet

              
                 Psalm of Life
  Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
  And, departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the sands of time;--
  Footprints, that perhaps another,
    Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
  A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
    Seeing, shall take heart again.

  Let us, then, be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
  Still achieving, still pursuing,
    Learn to labor and to wait.
    Longfellow

 
                   From   Birds of Passage
       The heights by great men reached and kept
         Were not attained by sudden flight,
       But they, while their companions slept,
         Were toiling upward in the night.
      Standing on what too long we bore
        With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
     We may discern--unseen before--
        A path to higher destinies.
      Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
        As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
     If, rising on its wrecks, at last
        To something nobler we attain.
   Longfellow

 
"The king appeared...with his dogs and sycophants behind him." (Kathleen Winsor). 

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