Food For Thought

[see also: TALENT]

...all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can.

I hear and I forget.
I see and I believe.
I do and I understand.

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!
(Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!)

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Action and passion is as absent in the present age as peril is absent from swimming in shallow waters....

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do....

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give it as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as most important, For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged.

The most decisive actions of our life -- I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future -- are, more often than not, unconsidered.

The curse of me & my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

I become aware of the old Buddhist axiom of not striving. It seems clear that if I pour my energy into creating beauty and euphoria, this simultaneously creates an empty hole which I will subsequently experience as the opposite. The answer is equanimity -- let things be as they are.

When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control the environment.

Man adjusts to what he should not; he is unable to adjust to what he should.

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

Abroad in the world today is a monstrous falsehood, a consummate fabrication, to which all social agencies have loaned themselves and into which most men, women, and children have been seduced. In previous writings, I have called this forgery "the Eleventh Commandment"; for such, indeed, has become the injunction: You Must Adjust!

Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

There is an innocence in admiration: he has it to whom it has not yet occurred that he too could one day be admired.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

[see also: MURPHY'S LAW, DISASTER, SUFFERING]

Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortunes.

Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

Ingenium res adversae nudare solent, celare secundae.
(Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.)

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.

Common and vulgar people ascribe all ills that they feel to others; people of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one.

Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?

I had never complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, nor murmured at the ordinances of heaven, excepting on one occasion, that my feet were bare, and I had not wherewithal to shoe them. In this desponding state I entered the metropolitan mosque at Cufah, and there I beheld a man that had no feet.

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.

Observe nature, follow the route that it traces for you. Nature exercises children continually, it hardens their temperament by all kinds of difficulties, it teaches them early the meaning of pain and sorrow. Teething gives them fevers, sharp colics bring on convulsions, long coughing suffocates them, worms torment them, plethora corrupts their blood, various leavens ferment it and cause dangerous eruptions. Almost all of the first age is sickness and danger: one half of the children who are born die before their eighth year. The tests passed, the infant has gained strength, and as soon as he can make use of his life its principle becomes more secure.

This is the law of nature. Why would you contradict it? Do you not see that in your efforts to improve upon its work you are destroying it, that you impede the effect of its aims? To do from without what she does within is according to you to increase the danger twofold. On the contrary, it is the way to avert it. Experience shows that children delicately raised are more likely to die. Provided we do not overdo it, there is less risk in using their strength than in sparing it . Accustom them therefore to the hardships they will have to face; train them to endure extremes of temperature, climate, and condition, hunger, thirst, and weariness. Dip them in the waters of Styx. Before bodily habits are acquired you may teach what habits you will without danger. But once habits are established any change becomes perilous. A child will bear changes which a man cannot bear. The muscles of the one are soft and flexible and take whatever direction you give them without any effort. The muscles of the grown man are harder and they only change their accustomed mode of action when subjected to violence. One can thus make a child robust without risking his life or health; and even if there were some risk, one should not hesitate. Since risks are inseperable from human life, can we do better than face them at a time when they can do the least harm?

Far from trying to prevent Emile from hurting himself, I would be worried if he never hurt himself, if he grew up not knowing pain. To suffer is the first thing that he must learn and the one that he will have the greatest need to know. It seems that children are small and weak only in order to learn these important lessons without any danger. The child has such a little way to fall he will not break his leg; if he knocks himself with a stick he will not break his arm; if he grabs a sharp knife he will not grasp it tight enough to make a deep wound. So far as I know, no child left to himself has ever been known to kill or maim himself or even to do himself any serious harm, unless he has been foolishly left on a high place or alone near the fire or within reach of dangerous weapons. What is there to be said for all the paraphernalia which surrounds the child to protect him on every side against pain until, having grown up, he remains at its mercy without courage and without experience, and believes himself dead at the first pinprick and faints at the sight of blood?

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.

The path to perfection is difficult to men in every lot; there is no royal road for rich or poor. But difficulties are meant to rouse not discourage.

Adversity is the first path to truth.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

One can resist adversity better than prosperity. We get out of ill luck in more entire condition than out of good luck. Charybdis is misery, but wealth is Scylla.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble." It comes to us all: not to make us sad, but to make us sober; not to make us sorry, but to make us wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us, as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish us, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field, -- to multiply our joy, as the seed is multiplied a hundred-fold by planting. Our conception of life is not Divine, and our thought of garden-making is not inspired. Our earthly flowers are quickly planted, and they quickly bloom, and then they are gone; while God would plant those flowers which, by transplantation, shall live forever.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.

Humanity either makes or breeds or tolerates all its afflictions, great and small.

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?

I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?

To shrug.

...I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered.

The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Advertising is legalized lying.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status.

...Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particular if the goods are worthless.

The authors of the book have no quarrel with the technique of advertising as such. It is a magnificent technique. Sanely applied it could remake the world.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and the respect for the integrity of man.

Next to Christianity, advertising is the greatest force in the world. And I say that without sacrilege or disrespect. Advertising makes people discontented. It makes them want things they don't have. Without discontent, there is no progress, no achievement.

Old people like to give good advice, as solace for no longer being able to provide bad examples.

It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Nous nous confions rarement...ceux qui sont meilleurs que nous.
(We seldom confide in those who are better than ourselves.)

[see also: HEAVEN, HELL]

To put it in one word, the whole creation is recurrent. Whatsoever you are to meet with has been: whatsoever you are to lose will be. Nothing exists for the first time. All things return to their estate after having departed: all things begin when they have ceased. They come to an end simply that they may come to be: nothing perishes except with a view to salvation. Therefore this whole revolving scheme of things is an attestation of the resurrection of the dead.

...the interval between death & the resurrection is to them that sleep & perceive it not, a moment.

There is a perpetual equilibrium between heaven and hell; for from hell there continually exspires and ascends an effort to do evil, and from heaven there continually exspires and descends an endeavor to do good: the world of spirits is in this equilibrium, which world is in the midst between heaven and hell, as may be seen above, n. 421-431. That the world of spirits is in that equilibrium, is because every man after death first enters into the world of spirits, and is there kept in a similar state to that in which he was in in the world, which could not be the case unless the most exact equilibrium were there. For by means of this all are explored as to their quality, being left there to their freedom, such as they lived in during their abode in the world: spiritual equilibrium is the freedom appertaining to man and spirit, as was said above, n. 589). The quality of every one's freedom is there discovered by the angels in heaven, through communication of affections and thoughts from heaven; and it appears visible to the sight before angelic spirits by the ways in which they go: they who are good spirits go in the ways which tend to heaven, but evil spirits go in the ways which tend to hell. Ways actually appear in that world; which also is the reason that ways, in the Word, signify truths which lead to good, and in the opposite sense falses which lead to evil; and hence also it is, that to go, to walk, and to journey, in the Word, signify progressions of life [62.1]. Such ways it has often been granted me to see, and likewise the spirits going and walking upon them freely according to their affections and thoughts thence derived.

Like the caterpillar, man crawls for a while on the earth; he is then received by it, in the wooden chrysalis, the coffin, where he rests throughout the winter; in the spring he breaks through the shell and rises out of the cold earth, with new and unsullied beauty.

It must be so -- Plato, thou reasonest well!
Elsewhence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out a hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep -- that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another!

My poor friend, we don't know what to do with this short life, and do you want another which shall be eternal!

Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

Dying is like getting out of a car. You leave a shell behind, but you're the same person as ever.

[see also: MATURITY, YOUTH]

What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey?

The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living or aware of death.

Most men make use of the first part of their life to render the last part miserable.

Every man desires to live long, but no one would be old.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

That vague, crepuscular time, the time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth has passed, but old age has not yet arrived.

To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.

If I'd known I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say "Of whay?" I can only answer "We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it won't be discovery.

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged...run to shelter; they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate momentos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood -- a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophesy.

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.

I know I'm going to get old and be one of those crazy women who sits on balconies and spits on people and screams, 'Get a haircut!' I know this, and I don't really fear it. I'd just like to move toward it with as much grace and dignity as possible.

[see also: ATHEISM, GOD]

There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not.

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis" -- had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion.

[...]

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes.

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle. Positively, the principle may be expressed as in matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can take you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that matters are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.

Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.

Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster.

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness....

Agnosticism is the philosophical, ethical and religious dry-rot of the modern world.

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.

[see also: BEER, DRUGS, WINE]

Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.

It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it cutteth phlegm, it abandoneth melancholy, it reliseth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it cureth the hydropsy, it healeth the strangulary, it pounceth the stone, it expelleth gravel, it puffeth away all ventosity, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from maffling, the teeth from chattering, and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the weason from stifling, the stomach from wambling, and the heart from swelling; the belly from wirtching, the guts from rumbling, the hands from shivering, the veins from crampling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking.

Porter: Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.
Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke?
Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.

Tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.

A night of good drinking
Is worth a year's thinking.

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink:
Good wine - a friend - or being dry -
Or lest we should be by and by -
Or any other reason why.

There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.... This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

So, at last we walk away from the racket and uproar of Bacchus, when Death calls out: neighbour, come! now your hourglass is filled up. Old man, put away your crutch, and you, young man, obey my law: take the arm of the prettiest nymph that smiles at you. Do you feel that the grave is too deep? Well, then get yourself a drink, then have another, have a second, have a third, and you will die more content.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication.

What's drinking?
A mere pause from thinking!

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

O Beer! O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp, Bass!
Names that should be on every infant's tongue!

Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkeness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.

Alcohol is like love: the first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.

If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker,
It is slick to stick a lock upon your stock,
Or some joker who is slicker's going to trick you of your liquor;
Though you snicker you'll feel sicker from the shock.
Be a piker though your clubmates mock and bicker,
For like brokers round a ticker they will flock
To your locker full of liquor, and your stock will vanish quicker,
If you fail to lock your liquor with a lock.

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

Fermentation and Civilization are inseparable.

Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.

The awe with which man has regarded this natural process finds spontaneous expression in the fact that the animating essence produced by fermentation is identified in language with the essence of human life, both being designated by the term "spirit."

Five stages of drunkness: Verbose, jocose, lachrymose, bellicose, comatose.

Bibo, ergo sum (I drink, therefore I am).

How can you waste beer like that! Don't you realize there are sober children in Africa!

[see also: CYCLES, INFINITY]

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

Begin at the beginning...and go on until you come to the end: then stop.

[see also: GOALS]

No ascent is too steep for mortals. Heaven itself we seek in our folly.

Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

[see also: LIBERTY]

A state may be ruled by correction, and weapons of war may be used with crafty dexterity, but the kingdom is made one's own only by freedom from action and purpose.

How do I know that this is so? By these facts: multiple taboos increase the poverty of the people; the more sharp tools the people have to add to their profit, the greater disorder in the state and clan; the more acts of crafty dexterity, the more strange contrivances appear; the more display there is of laws and edicts, the greater the number of thieves and robbers.

Therefore, a sage has said, "I will do nothing, and the people will be transformed of themselves; I will keep still, and the people will of themselves become correct. I will take no trouble, and the people will of themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity."

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - 'That government is best which governs not at all;` and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

"Anarchy," Tucker insisted, "means a slow growth of the principles of liberty and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt nots' of laws and constitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by compulsion from without..." And the first step in this procedure, he held, is to disabuse oneself of the idea that government, even when that government takes the form of parliamentary democracy functioning after the principle of majority rule and minority rights, is capable of assuring the individual freedom or of bringing about a condition of harmonious relations among people. If mankind is ever to realize justice in its actual social relations, the notion that the individual citizen has a moral obligation to the State must be completely abandoned. We anarchists, Tucker proclaimed, "look upon all obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed." And this means nothing less than that the State, which is to say formal government itself, must be discarded as an instrument of social control.

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

Limitation is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete, it dies in anarchy.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

[see also: MAXIMS]

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

...usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

...it's more interesting to live
when you're furious!

[see also: CATS, DOGS, ZOO]

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats -- all human life is there.

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Shall we never have done with that cliche, so stupid that it could only be human, about the sympathy of animals for man when he is unhappy? Animals love happiness almost as much as we do. A fit of crying disturbs them, they'll sometimes imitate sobbing, and for a moment they'll reflect our sadness. But they flee unhappiness as they flee fever, and I believe that in the long run they are capable of boycotting it.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted....

Elephants are considered an endangered species and as such should not be used by U.S. military personnel. There are about 600,000 African elephants and between 30,000 and 50,000 Asian elephants. Approximately 20 percent are in captivity, so it is difficult to estimate their numbers exactly. The Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species regards both species as threatened. Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either. They simply follow their biological pattern, shaped by evolution.

We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathetic.

Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie--
Dust unto dust--
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell--
Too strong to strive--
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng--
The cowed and the meek--
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak!

Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.

This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon.

[see also: MUSIC]

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like.

The highest problem in every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the illusion of a loftier reality.

Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

I call architecture frozen music.

Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man.

Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.

Art us vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.

Art as the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinilhilist par excellance.

Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge -- of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge.

Art as the redemption of the man of action -- of those who not only see the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live it, want to live it, the tragic-warlike men, then hero.

Art as the redemption of the sufferer -- as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

Thinking directly in terms of colors, tones, images, is a different operation technically from thinking in words...if all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. There are values and meaning that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence.

If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Great art is a irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

The demand of readers for brand new material which is just like what they've already read is a publishing reality, and it can be found behind virtually every best seller. (The same principle applies - even more strongly - to the less literate media: television, movies, popular music.)

Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.

I want to arrive at a direct apprehension of reality without the intermediary of a concept. I often end up in darkness and failure because of the impossibility but I prefer it all to all of the other so-called marvels of the visionary world. Good art is not what it looks like but what it does to us. Its value lies in its power to modify and not merely to modify but reorganize our sensibility. For to submit to a new mode of seeing, to enter a world where we can be liberated from our stereotyped ways of seeing and feeling -- now that is more important to aim for all of one's life and perhaps never achieve than to aim for less and know that in the end you've made a bad investment with your life.

...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards.

People don't know what they like, but they like what they know.

...for a good work of art can, and will indeed, have moral consequences; but to require moral ends of the artist, is to destroy his profession.

The man who never in his mind and thought travelled to heaven, is no artist.... Mere enthusiasm is the all in all.... Passion and expression are beauty itself.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The "mass mind" has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he -- for some reason -- thinks it would be a good idea to give them. Business Art is a much better thing to be making than Art Art, because Art Art doesn't support the space it takes up, whereas Business Art does. If Business Art doesn't support its own space it goes out-of-business.

In a civilisation or culture where the political institutions lack credibility, where the process of law is clearly neither concerned with the provision of natural justice nor the establishment of truth, where our financial institutions are clearly not particularly interested in the financial best interests of little people, it places a particularly great responsibility on the culture's artists to speak in words which are true.

Astrology is a disease, not a science.

[see also: AGNOSTICISM, GOD]

To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

The atheist has no hope.

...if atheism be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

[see also: DESIRE, LUXURY, NEEDS]

What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey?

If you would abolish avarice, you must abolish the parent of it, luxury.

Because men believe not Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard.

They do not believe any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.

Mankind, by the perverse depravity of their nature, esteem that which they have most desired as of no value the moment it is possessed, and torment themselves with fruitless wishes for that which is beyond their reach.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Avarice is the vice of declining years.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

If an emergency strikes, a man should be able to leave his home with nothing more than the clothes on his back without feeling that he has left something behind.

He had never questioned the Ten Commandments, nor had he knowingly disobeyed them. Like many another before him, he attributed the sad state of the world and the sin of its inhabitants to their refusal to heed those Rules. But in his ponderings, God Himself, he at last devoutly concluded, had underestimated the stupidity of mankind. So he undertook to amend the Decalogue himself, by adding "...or cause..." to each Commandment, just to make it easier for a man to work with:

"...or cause the Name of the Lord to be taken in vain."

"...or cause stealing to be done."

"...or cause dishonor to thy father and thy mother."

"...or cause the commission of adultery."

"...or cause a killing to be done."

But his revelation came to him when he came to the last one. It was suddenly clear to him that all mankind's folly -- all greed, lust, war, all dishonor, sprang from humanity's almost total disregard for this edict and its amendment: "Thou shalt not covet...nor cause covetousness!"

It came to him that to arouse covetousness in another is just as deadly a sin as to kill him or to cause his murder. Yet all around the world empires rose, great yachts and castles and hanging gardens came into being, tombs and trusts and college grants, all for the purpose of arousing the envy or covetousness of the less endowed -- or having that effect no matter what the motive.