Boldness be my friend!
Arm me, audacity, from heat to foot!
~ in Cymbeline
* * *
Unkindness strikes a deeper wound than steel.
* * *
As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.
* * *
Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
* * *
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
* * *
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
* * *
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
~ in Othello, Act II, scene iii
* * *
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
~ in Othello, Act III, scene iii
* * *
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
~ in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
* * *
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
* * *
The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation.
* * *
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler
Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy
Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May
But then no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
~ Irving Stone, in Lust for Life
Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?
__________
(click on image)
.
Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
~ Joseph Addison
Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
~ W. H. Auden
Reading maketh a full man.
~ Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, other to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested.
~ Francis Bacon
He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
~ Isaac Barrow
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky
Reader, If it be not strong upon thy heart to practise what thou readest, to what end dost thou read? To increase thy own condemnation? If thy light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing man thou art, the more miserable man thou wilt be in the day of recompense; thy light and knowledge will more torment thee than all the devils in hell. Thy knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash thee, and that scorpion that will for ever bite thee, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw thee; therefore read, and labour to know, that thou mayest do, or else thou art undone for ever. When Demosthenes was asked, what was the first part of an orator, what the second, what the third? he answered, Action; the same may I say. If any should ask me, what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian? I must answer, Action; as that man that reads that he may know, and that labours to know that he may do, will have two heavens — a heaven of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and a heaven of glory and happiness after death.
~ Thomas Brooks, in Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks, Banner of Truth, 1652 p. 22
Books we must have though we lack bread.
~ Alice Brotherton
A good book is never exhausted. It oges on whispering to you from the wall.
~ Anatole Broyard
Laws die; books never.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
~ Anthony Burgess
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
~ Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
~ Italo Calvino
Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
~ Henry Seidel Canby
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle
In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle
He gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances that a-nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus he sleeping little and reading much the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that degree that at last he lost the use of his reason.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in Don Quixote
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
~ William E. Channing
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb
The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
~ Chines proverb
“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquanintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
~ Winston Churchill
Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.
~ Cicero
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Cicero
The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
~ Tom Clancy
A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
~ Henry T. Coutts
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
~ Hart Crane
Literature is man’s exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
~ David Daiches
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
~ Rene Descartes
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
~ Charles Dickens
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of Prancing Poetry.
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
~ Emily Dickinson
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
~ Michael Dirda
I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
~ Marguerite Duras
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, the most patient teachers.
~ Charles Eliot
A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience”
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Scholar
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. My luggage is my library. My home is where my books are.
~ Desiderius Erasmus
There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
~ Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
~ Clifton Fadiman
If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the Empire were laid at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
~ Francois Fenelon
But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!
~ Eugene Field in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
~ Gustave Flaubert
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
~ Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary
Read in order to Live.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
~ Anatole France
There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
~ Anatole France
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
~ William Gladstone
I have always suspected that authors lie about the books they read, their purported influences, much as men lie about their sex lives; they are at once ashamed and vain, reluctant to be judged, hiding behind a safe parapet like Joyce and Proust and Kafka.
~ Brian Glanville
The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula Le Guin
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it ives you moral knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick
What is a book? Part matter and part spirit; par thing and part thought–however you look at it, if defies definition.
~ Ernest O. Hauser
All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.
~ Ernest Hemingway
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
~ Gilbert Highet
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
~ S.I. Hiyakawa
Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
~ Horace as quoted by Montaigne
Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not escape from my own life and problems. It is escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me.
~ Gladys Hunt, in Honey for a Woman’s Heart (HT: Heidi)
Every man who knows how to read has it in him power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
~ Aldous Huxley
Farther than arrows, higher than wings fly poet’s song and prophet’s words.
~ Inscription on the Brooklyn Public Library
Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.
~ Inscription in the Detroit Public Library
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ Inscription in the New York Public Library.
Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library
People who don’t read are brutes.
~ Eugene Ionesco
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I cannot live without books.
~ Thomas Jefferson
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ Joseph Joubert
A reader finds little in a book save what he puts here. But in a great book he finds space to put many things.
~ Joseph Joubert
A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
~ Franz Kafka
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
~ Garrison Keillor
As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I’ve gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
~Garrison Keillor
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~ Helen Keller
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.
~ John F. Kennedy
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”–the norms of human action.
~ Russell Kirk, in Enemies of the Permanent Things. LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984. page 41
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
~ Charles Lamb
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
~ Charles Lamb
Magazines all too frequently lead to books, and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
~ Fran Lebowitz
Any kid who has parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
~ Sam Levenson
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~ C. S. Lewis
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, read and reviewed by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell
The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
~ Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, April 11, 1868
Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton
What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”
There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley, in The Haunted Bookshop
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris
Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson
I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
~ William Lyon Phelps
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman
People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin
The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell
All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg
The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
~ Carl Sandburg, from his poem “For You”, in Harvest Poems: 1910-1960
The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca
It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer
No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron
My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson
Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau, in Reading
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber
Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.
If you’re going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it’s well furnished.
~ Peter Ustinov
You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
~ Stephen Vizinczey
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from out neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
~ Voltaire
Books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language; the others do not matter.
~ Voltaire
A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
~ Bernard de Voto
I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
~ Simone Weil
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E.P. Whipple
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White
Comerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.
~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
~ Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray
A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure–the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.
~ Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
~ Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting”
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
~ Virginia Woolf
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar
A Thanksgiving Poem
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
The sun hath shed its kindly light,
Our harvesting is gladly o’er,
Our fields have felt no killing blight,
Our bins are filled with goodly store.
From pestilence, fire, ‘flood, and sword
We have been spared by thy decree,
And now with humble hearts, O Lord,
We come to pay our thanks to thee.
We feel that had our merits been
The measure of thy gifts to us,
We erring children, born of sin,
Might not now be rejoicing thus.
No deed of ours hath brought us grace;
When thou wert nigh our sight was dull,
We hid in trembling from thy face,
But thou, O God, wert merciful.
Thy mighty hand o’er all the land
Hath still been open to bestow
Those blessings which our wants demand
From heaven, whence all blessings flow.
Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,
Looked down on us with holy care,
And from thy storehouse in the sky
Hast scattered plenty everywhere.
Then lift we up our songs of praise
To thee, O Father, good and kind;
To thee we consecrate our days;
Be thine the temple of each mind.
With incense sweet our thanks ascend;
Before thy works our powers pall;
Though we should strive years without end,
We could not thank thee for them all.
Freedom lies in being bold.
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
Carpe diem, quam minimus credula postero. [Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in tomorrow.]
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. [It is sweet and beautiful to die for your country.]
He who has begun his task has half done it. Have the courage to be wise; Begin!
Many heroes are oppressed in unending night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a dedicated poet.
__________
RELATED CONTENT
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The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell and a hell of a heav’n.
I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the office, both private and public, of peace and war.
~ John Milton, in Areopagitica and Of Education. Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing, 1951. page 60
O why did god
Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With Men as Angels without Feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?
~ John Milton, in Paradise Lost
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The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that files feels the attraction of earth.
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is held together.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Patriotism ruins history.
Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Only engage and the mind grows heated;
Begin and then the work will be completed.
The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can be and should be, and he will become as he can and should be.
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