Gifts

Let me tell thee, time is a very precious gift of God; so precious that it is only given to us moment by moment.
- Amelia Barr, 1931 - 1919

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be Enthusiasm.
- Bruce Barton, 1886 - 1967

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
- Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884 - 1962

In case you ever run out of gift ideas, here's a little tip: give me your laugh. Whether it's mischievous, tender, loud, or quiet, simply give me a laugh from your heart. Your laughter brings me never-ending joy.
- Helmut Walch

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
- Mother Teresa, 1910 - 1997

Confidence

I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do.
- Everett Edward Hale, 1822 - 1909

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
- Lillian Hellman, 1905 - 1984

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
- May Sarton, 1912 - 1995

If you have made mistakes ... there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.
- Mary Pickford, 1893 - 1979

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storms terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
- Vincent van Gogh, 1853 - 1890

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
- Lillian Smith, 1897 - 1966

Darkness

Science has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
- Aldous Leonard Huxley, 1894 - 1963

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
- Carl Gustav Jung, 1875 - 1961

Flowers grow out of dark moments.
- Corita Kent

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
- Corrie Ten Boom, 1892 - 1987

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
- Henry Miller, 1891 - 1980

The darkest hour has only 60 minutes.
- Morris Mandel

Illumination

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
- Dag Hammarskjold, 1905 - 1961

God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path. Yet many seek life from without, unaware that is within them.
- Kahlil Gibran, 1883 - 1931

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
- May Sarton, 1912 - 1995

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.
- Emil Nolde, 1867 - 1956

Electricity

Science and religion no more contradict each other than light and electricity.
- William Hiram Foulkes

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.
- George Carlin

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self- employment and artistic autonomy.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860 - 1904

If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as "candle making industry threatened".
- Newt Gingrich

Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist’s power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

Trying to paint according to a general rule means renouncing the wealth of the soul.

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

- All from Paul Klee, 1879 - 1940

About: Paul Klee was born at Münchenbuchsee (near Bern), Switzerland on 18 Dec in 1879. At first he planned to follow a musical career like the rest of his family, but turned to the visual arts and went to München (Munich) to train at the Academy of Fine Arts, meeting many of the leading avant garde artists of the day in his life there after graduating. He served in the Kaiser's army as a medic, then taught art at the Bauhaus and later at Düsseldorf before the Nazis declared his work "degenerate" and sent him packing. He spent the rest of his life in Switzerland, a major new museum was built at Bern, to house and show his work.

William Safire

What we don't need to know for achievement, we need to know for our pleasure. Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.

Never assume the obvious is true.

To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.

The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.

After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction; a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine; a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine; a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate; a glutton embraces the white porcelain altar, or, more plainly, he barfs.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
- All from William Safire

About: William Safire was born at New York City on 17 Dec in 1929. He attended public school at The Bronx, graduating from Bronx High School of Science in 1947. He dropped out after two years Syracuse University, but was later asked to give a commencement address and now serves as a trustee. After service in the Army he worked in public relations, then joined Nixon's White House staff as a speech writer. (Agnew's line, "nattering nabobs of negativism" was from one of Safire's speeches.) Many were appalled when the noted conservative joined the New York Times as a political commentator in 1973, but many were delighted when his "On Language" column began in 1979. He is a master of the English language.

Margaret Mead

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.
- All from Margaret Mead, 1901 - 1978

About: Margaret Mead was born at Philadelphia on 16 Dec in 1901; when she died in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world. She wrote 20 books and was coauthor of 20 more. Her most famous work, "Coming of Age in Samoa", has come under attack, but she certainly contributed to the public awareness of anthropology and the quotes here certainly sound sensible.

Towers

Trust also your own judgment, for it is your most reliable counselor. A man's mind has sometimes a way of telling him more than seven watchmen posted on a high tower.
- Ecclesiasticus

A tree trunk the size of a man grows from a blade as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small heap of earth.
- Lao-Tzu

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
- Logan Pearsall Smith, 1865 - 1946

A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.
- Mason Cooley

Heinrich Heine

Of course God will forgive me; that's His job.

Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.

He only profits from praise who values criticism.

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Oh what lies lurk in kisses!

- All from Heinrich Heine, 1797 - 1856

About: Harry Heine was born at Duesseldorf, Germany on 13 Dec in 1797, in a time in which the area was occupied by the French which helped the prospects of Jews. He trained for business and law, and though he converted to Protestantism (required for civil service or practicing law) and earned his law degree in 1825, his interest had turned to literature. He moved to Paris in 1831 for the intellectual community, remained there after some of his writing made him unwelcome in Germany. In addition to poetry (some of which was set to music by German composers such as Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann), he also wrote travel pieces and political essays. When he converted he took the name he published under, Heinrich Heine.

Symmetry

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
- Aristotle, 384 - 322 BC

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
- Derek Walcott

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.
- Frances E. Willard, 1839 - 1898

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
- George Gordon Noel Byron, 1788 - 1824

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.
- Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

War

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
- Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970

No one would be foolish enough to choose war over peace - in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.
- Croesus of Lydia, 595 - 547 BC

A great war leaves the country with three armies; an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
- German proverb

In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.
- Stanislaus J. Lec

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
- Otto von Bismarck, 1815 - 1898

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
- Ambrose Bierce

Organization

Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.
- Arthur Helps

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
- Boris Pasternak, 1890 - 1960

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
- Cyril Connolly, 1903 - 1974

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
- Joseph Sobran

Sailors, with their built-in sense of order and discipline, should really be running the world.
- Lord Louis Mountbatten

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
- Maurits Cornelius Escher, 1898 - 1972

Sermons

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
- James Earl Jones

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
- John Burroughs, 1837 - 1921

The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying, not "What a lovely sermon," but "I will do something!"
- Francis de Sales, 1567 - 1622

The deeds you do today may be the only sermon some people will hear today.
- Francis of Assisi, 1182 - 1226

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church ... is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.
- Dwight L. Moody, 1837 - 1899

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Reconciliation

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.
- Charles Williams

One of the most basic principles for making and keeping peace within and between nations... is that in political, military, moral, and spiritual confrontations, there should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.
- James Earl Carter, Jr

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, 1759 - 1805

Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last. While we all hope for peace it shouldn't be peace at any cost but peace based on principle, on justice.
- Corazón Cojuangco Aquino

He who forgiveth, and is reconciled unto his enemy, shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers.
- Qu'ran 42:40

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
- Stefan Zweig, 1881 - 1942

Pencils

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890 - 1969

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.
- Joyce A. Myers

I am like a pencil in God's hand. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used.
- Mother Teresa, 1910 - 1997

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead.
- Robert Brault

My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
- Vladimir Nabokov, 1899 - 1977

Samuel Butler

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all.
- All from Samuel Butler, 1835 - 1902

About: Samuel Butler was born in Langar Rectory, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, England on 4 Dec in 1835. His father and grandfather had been Anglican clergy, and he was schooled for that career, but during what we would call an internship he lost his faith. Corresponding with his father about his doubts led to such a rift with his family that he moved to New Zealand and raised sheep for five years before returning to London. He wrote the satirical novel Erewhon (nowhere spelled backwards) anonymously, it was well regarded and there was great surprise when the unknown Butler finally acknowledged it.

Specialization

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert Anson Heinlein, 1907 - 1988

The time comes when you realize that you haven't only been specializing in something - something has been specializing in you.
- Arthur Miller, 1915 - 2005

In the 20th century, specialisation has become the counterfeit of brilliance.
- Richard Gordon

The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance—these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1904 - 1967

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
- Theodore Roethke, 1908 - 1963

Rex Stout

I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.
- The Rubber Band

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.
- Over My Dead Body

A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
- Murder By the Book

No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
- Before Midnight

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
- Death of a Dude

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.
- A Family Affair
- All from Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886 - 1975

About: Rex Todhunter Stout was born at Noblesville, Indiana on 1 Dec in 1886. At age nine he was known as a prodigy in arithmetic. He attended the University of Kansas for a short time, then joined the Navy and served as warrant officer on Teddy Roosevelt's yacht. He devised a school banking program that was used in over 400 US cities, then went to Paris to write. After three novels, he wrote Fer-de-lance, his first mystery novel featuring the stay-at-home fat (a seventh of a ton) genius detective Nero Wolfe and his energetic legman Archie Goodman. A month before his death his 72nd Nero Wolfe mystery A Family Affair was published, and one more was discovered after his death. He wrote his novels long hand for many years, with very few revisions and he never rewrote a page. These quotes are all from the great detective.