“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -~Aristotle
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“To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually tends toward disorder.” — Jacques Barzun
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“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Teilhard de Chardin
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“Revolution . . . the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea.”
Jacques Barzun, from “From Dawn to Decadence.”
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“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” — Will Durant
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“The Judge held that a person as corpulent and free-sweating as he was needed two baths a day, and those who were around him would agree with this. So at those crepuscular hours the old Judge would be splashing, snorting and singing . . . his favorite bathtub songs were “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and “I’m a Rambling Wreck From Georgia Tech.”
Carson McCullers, from “Clock Without Hands.”
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“I don’t know how I feel till I hold that steel. That was always true: I might have a cold, or one of those days when everything is hard to do because you’re tired for no reason at all except that you’re alive, and I’d work out, and by the time I got in the shower I couldn’t remember how I felt before I lifted; it was like that part of the day was yesterday and now I was starting a new one. Or a hangover: some of my friends and my brother too are hair-of-the-dog people, but I’ve never done that and I never will, because a drink in the morning shuts down the whole day, and anyway, I can’t stand the smell of it in the morning and my stomach tells me it would like a Coke or a milkshake, but it is not about to stand for a prank like a shot of vodka or even a beer.”
Andre Dubus, from “The Pretty Girl.”
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“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”
Pope John XXIII
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“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”
Tim O’Brien, from “The Things They Carried”
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“She would of been a good woman,’ the Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Flannery O’Connor, from “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
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‘I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’
Blaise Pascal, from “The Pensees.”
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“In any case, I have a good memory. I can recall every word of what I read. My memory is such that I used to win prizes in school because of my ability to remember names and dates, inventions, battles, treaties, alliances, and the like. I always scored highest on factual tests, and in later years, in the ‘real world,’ as it’s called, my memory stood me in good stead. For instance, if I were asked right now to give the details of the Council of Trent or the Treaty of Utrecht, or to talk about Carthage, that city razed by the Romans after Hannibal’s defeat (the Roman soldiers plowed salt into the ground so that Carthage could never be called Carthage again), I could do so. If called upon to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’, or the Hundred Years’ War, or simply the First Silesian War, I could hold forth with the greatest enthusiasm and confidence. Ask me anything about the Tartars, the Renaissance popes, or the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, Thermopylae, Shiloh, or the Maxim gun. Easy. Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie.”
Raymond Carver, from “Blackbird Pie.”
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. . . on the wall 