We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an
act but a habit.
--Aristotle
One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead
systems--wars, religions, nations, destructions--to refuse to be a
part of them, and express instead the highest selves we know how to
be.
--Richard Bach
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we
know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that
we have still to make a study of 'and.'
--A.S. Eddington
Desire's most seductive promise is not pleasure but change, not
that you might possess your object but that you might become the
one who belongs with it.
--James Richardson
How we choose what we do, and how we approach it...will
determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur,
or to something resembling a work of art.
--Mihalyi Csikzsentmihalyi
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I
tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires
strength, strength and courage, to yield to.
--Oscar Wilde
Words. She knows so many. She knows seven languages, and all of
them different, and in all of them she is hungry.
--Candas Jane Dorsey, _Black Wine_
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
--Napoleon Bonaparte
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to
be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to
know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
--Wallace Stevens
Machine and garden are not absolutely opposed to each other.
Machinery can exist in the garden... The question is not one of
restricting machines from the garden but asking whether a machine
serves the interest of the garden, or the garden the interest of
the machine.
--James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
...Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his
death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who,
knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any
power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for
life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred,
or the dark.
--Ursula K. Le Guin
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind
us, with nothing to show for our progress but the memory of the
smell of smoke and the presumption that once our eyes watered.
--Tom Stoppard
Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume
that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the
powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own
compass also.
Marcus Aurelius
'What is a human being, then?'
'A seed.'
'A... seed?'
'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a
tree.'
--David Zindell, The Broken God
If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains
unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not
only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to
be one.
--John Barrow
Poetry is the art of not succeeding;
the art of making a little ritual
out of your own bad luck, lighting a little fire
made of leaves, reciting a prayer
in the ordinary dark.
-- Joe Salerno
Don't be dismayed at goodbyes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes,
is certain for those who are friends.
--Richard Bach
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on
sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is
necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be
restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
--Albert Einstein
The possibility of stepping into a higher plane is quite real
for everyone. It requires no force or effort or sacrifice. It
involves little more than changing our ideas about what is normal.
--Deepak Chopra
We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety
lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new
to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life.
--John Updike
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
--Jorge Luis Borges