"Those laws [of nature] are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts."
Also given as:
"I am merely thinking God's thoughts after Him."
~ Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.
~ Aristotle
There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
"Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not."~Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience. The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought.
"We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”
"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived . . . this is to have succeeded." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim.
What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie -- the price one pays is the destructions of that which the gain was intended to serve.
...there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Only in mathematics was there that sense of moving through another dimension, one that didn't exist in time and place - that feeling of falling into and through a puzzle, of having it surround you in a physical way.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
You.
. . . your education centers about the most important creative feat of your life – the creation of yourself. It is about you – creating your effective mind, a mind enlivened by curiosity with the intellectual audacity to take risks and create new ideas, a mind that sees a world of unlimited possibilities. So I ask again: Have you failed recently? If not, then what are you waiting for?
What part of an inverse tangent function approaching an asymptote don't you understand?
. . . how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back -- if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?
If we continue to do today
what we did yesterday,
we will not be ready for tomorrow.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
