currently:
© 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 Suki Ewers
"What if you slept? and what if, in your sleep You dreamed? And what if,
in your dream, You went to Heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?
and what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?"
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and child-like - and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
-Albert Einstein
"Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time."
-Hippocrates
"All elevated thinking ends in a sigh."
-Paul Valery
"Damn the solar system. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered
with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better one myself."
-Lord Francis Jeffrey
"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve."
-Max Planck
"Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."
-Jules Henri Poincare, La Science et l'Hypothese
"Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly. And don't
tell me man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there."
-Wernher Von Braun
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
-Albert Einstein
"Learning is discovering that something is possible."
-Fritz Perls
"Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense."
-Thomas H. Huxley
"Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public."
-W. H. Auden
"Law of Thermodynamics: 1. You cannot win. 2. You cannot break even. 3. You cannot get out of the game."
-Anonymous
"I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability."
-Oscar Wilde
"I put my talent into my work. I put my genius into my life."
-Oscar Wilde
"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."
-John Lennon
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities."
-Eric Hoffer
"There is a reason in Nature why something should exist rather than not."
-Leibniz
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
-Steven Weinberg
"I think, therefore, I am."
-Rene Descartes
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
-Niels Bohr
"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."
-Aldous Huxley
"There is a way between voice and presence where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes.
-Rumi
"Chaos is ubiquitous."
-John Barrow
"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance"
-Goethe
"They are not smooth-surfaced,rectangular or carbon-ringed units which fit together like bricks. Each molecule is a heavenly octopus with a million floating jeweled tentacles hungry to merge."
-Timothy Leary
"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
-Albert Einstein
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
-Albert Einstein
"As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories
which are subtle and deep."
-Richard Feynman
"... what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination."
-J.S. Bell
"What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket."
-Richard Feynman
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true"
-Michael Faraday
"Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"The universe is not to be narrowed down to the limits of our understanding...but our understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered."
-Sir Francis Bacon
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil."
-Douglas Hofstadter
"Every dogma must have its day."
-H.G. Wells
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
-Alan Turing
"Set theory can be viewed as a form of exact theology."
-Rudy Rucker
"Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have."
-Alan Bennett
"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can
assure you that mine are still greater."
-Albert Einstein
"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty? he asked. Begin at the beginning the King said, gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
-Lewis Carroll
"Who is going to care in 500 years?"
-Linus van Pelt
"If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke- Ay! what then?"
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or
becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment.
These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the
mind there are no limits."
- Dr John Lilly
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean; who is neither tarnished nor afraid."
-Raymond Chandler
"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
-Walt Whitman
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
-Noam Chomsky
"When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self."
-Confucius
"Energy is Eternal Delight."
-William Blake
"Boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness!"
-Georges Jacques Danton
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the
true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
-Robert Frost
"Read not to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse;
but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted,
others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested;
that is, some books are to be read only in parts;
others to be read but not curiously;
and some few to be read wholly,
and with diligence and attention."
-Francis Bacon
"There are some things that are so serious that you have to laugh at them."
-Niels Bohr
"The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
-Robert Burns
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; A single experiment can prove me wrong."
-Albert Einstein
"The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts."
-Timothy Dwight
"When sitting, just sit. When standing, just stand. Above all don't wobble."
-ancient Chinese saying
"By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated."
-Aristophanes
"Intelligence is the ability to see many points of view without going completely bonkers."
-Douglas Adams
"The heart has its reasons which reason does not know."
-Blaise Pascal
"Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. "
-George Bernard Shaw
"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them. "
-Adlai Stevenson
"Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles."
-Anonymous
"What is essential is invisible to the eye."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know."
-Cicero
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
-George Orwell
"Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. "
-Karl Popper
"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able
to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."
-William Shakespeare
"The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God
than the believer caught up in his own false image of God."
-Martin Buber
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love
for truth; and truth rewarded me."
-Simone de Beauvoir
"Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown."
-Claude Bernard
"The object of art is to give life a shape."
-Jean Anouilh
"There is no sin greater than ignorance."
-Rudyard Kipling
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad
attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-Umberto Eco
"I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you."
-Freidrich Nietzsche
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
-Albert Einstein
"One who presumes to know the truth stops looking for it."
-Anonymous
"The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
- William James
"Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Only the educated are free."
-Epictetus-Discourses
"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge"
-Kahlil Gibran
"Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal."
-Isocrates
"Teachers open the door, but you enter by yourself."
-anonymous
"I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way."
-Franklin P. Adams
"My religion is simple, my religion is kindness."
- Dalai Llama
"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand
heads bowing in prayer."
- Ghandi
"I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong."
- Bertrand Russell
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"A Closed mind is a Dying mind."
-Edna Ferber
"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates
"Experience isn't what happens to you. It is what you make out of what
happens to you."
- Aldous Huxley
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they
are not already common."
-John Locke
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has
seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
-Albert Szent-Györgyi
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad
attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly
submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his
intelligence."
-Albert Einstein
"Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they
are."
- John W. Gardner
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
-Jonathan Swift
"All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."
-Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream
"Most people do not understand the things they experience, nor do they
know what they have learned; but they seem to themselves to have done
so."
-Heraclitus
"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln
"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with
ourselves we make poetry. "
-W. B. Yeats
"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. "
-Confucius
"There is a beauty in discovery.There is mathematics in music, a kinship of
science and poetry in the description of nature, and
exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place
different disciplines in different camps are revealed
as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge.
All literate men are sustained by the philosopher,
the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the
scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician."
-Glenn T. Seaborg
"All men are alike in their dreams, and all men are alike in the promises
they make. The difference is what they do."
-Moliere
"For all at last return to the sea to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end."
-Rachel Carson
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something
you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
-Doris Lessing
"There's a fine line between enlightened anarchy and total laziness."
-John Leighton Beezer
"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought"
-Graham Greene
"In the vast Library there are no two identical books."
- Jorge Luis Borges, ``The Library of Babel''
"Hell is truth seen too late."
- John Locke
"Beware of the man of one book."
-Thomas Aquinas
"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in
childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down
and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in
his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and
the company of men that call into question or
discuss it, and regards as impious those questions
which cannot easily be asked without disturbing
it--the life of that man is one long sin against
mankind."
-W. K. Clifford
"A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child."
-Anonymous
"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake."
-Confucius
"To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand."
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life."
-Rachel Carson
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Mohandas Ghandi
"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere."
-Empedocles
"Therefore, if you want discover nature's nakedness, you must destroy its symbols and the farther you get in the nearer you come to its essence. When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there your soul must stay."
-Meister Eckhart
"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
-The 14th Dalai Lama
"Re-examine all you have been told...Dismiss what insults your soul"
"The beginning is always today."
-Mary Wollstonecraft
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
-John Cage
"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
-Tom Robbins
"To change one's life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions."
-William James
"The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."
-James Joyce
"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should
burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I
would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent plant. The proper function of man is to
live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time."
-Jack London
"And he knew, suddenly, what the dream meant. He knew, and kept it to himself, for the meaning of dreams is for the men who dream them, never to be shared, never to be known."
-- from "Lonelyache" in I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to
enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer
spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and
you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."
Woodrow Wilson
"We find greatest joy, not in getting, but in expressing what we are...
Men do not really live for honors or for pay; their gladness is not the
taking and holding, but in doing, the striving, the building, the
living. It is a higher joy to teach than to be taught. It is good to get
justice, but better to do it; fun to have things but more to make them.
The happy man is he who lives the life of love, not for the honors it
may bring, but for the life itself."
R.J. Baughan
"Life is so short we must move very slowly."
Thai Expression
"People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge
waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass
of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by
themselves without wondering."
St. Augustine
"To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best night
and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
e.e. cummings
"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of
improving and that's your own self."
Aldous Huxley
"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all
means paint, and that voice will be silenced."
Vincent Van Gogh
"We are each others' angels, we meet when it is time."
Chuck Brodsky
"Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands -
a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom
and patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not
alone in the world."
Sidney Lovett
"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. "
Zhuangzi
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the
hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the
not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely
frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to
reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you
desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."
-Ayn Rand
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth
and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and
for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.
Think of it... always."
-"Mahatma Gandhi,Indian Political and Spiritual Leader
"What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"
-Henry James
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending
spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead
of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you
may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact,
violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for
violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a
night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that."
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is
evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good."
Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth
and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and
for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.
Think of it... always."
-Mahatma Gandhi,Indian Political and Spiritual Leader
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending
spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead
of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you
may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact,
violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for
violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a
night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that."
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The main thing is not to think of the future or the past.
The main thing is to just get on with now."
~ John Lennon
"If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed.
But we are more than logical.We are human beings,and we have faith,
and we have hope."
Jacques Cousteau, 1910-1997French Oceanographer
"Believe in butterflies.If they can fly a thousand miles,think what you can do.
You are alive so celebrate every moment.Discover what the world needs
that you believe in with all your heart -
a service you are really good at and love most to do.
Do that. Dive in. Let it be your classroom.Play with possibilities.
Cherish good people, including yourself.Get negative people out of your life.
Romp on the floor with your dog.Celebrate every moment.
Like a bird, soar the updrafts.
Make friends with trees and listen to their stories.Talk to yourself.
Ask yourself what you think.Pay attention to what you say.
Forget about being entertained -depart the audience and get onto the stage.
Fling wide the curtains.Earn enough for your need but not for your greed.
Leaving a heritage so that when you die,you will be missed."
Dr. Sami Sunchild
American Artist, Poet and Social Entreprenuer
"Dreams are never destroyed by circumstances; dreams are born in the
heart and mind and only there can they ever die."
Author Unknown
"
"
Reload for another random card from 'Oblique Strategies'
by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.