Inspiration Too

Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.
-- Jane Austen

He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.
-- Francis Bacon

Oh yeah, we know each other real well -- although I don't think we've ever fleshmet.
-- Howard Rheingold, apostle of technology and pioneer of virtual communities

"Life is Change, how it differs from the rocks, I have seen their ways too often for my liking."
--Jefferson Airplane

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
-- William Hazlitt

Law means good order.
- Aristotle

No one becomes depraved all at once.
- Juvenal

Innocence is ashamed of nothing.
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Well-behaved women rarely make history.
-- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."
-- Ozzy Ozbourne

I use not only the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
-- Woodrow Wilson

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.
People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others.
-- Audrey Hepburn (wrote it when asked to share her "beauty tips." Read at her funeral years later.)

Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on.
-- Steven Patrick Callahan

[Fandom] is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.
- C.S. Lewis

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
-- Dave Barry

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,999 vaccuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
-- Popular Mechanics, 1949

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
-- Kilgore Trout

Flowers are my music.
-- Dr. Thomas Arnold

"There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else."
-- Cyrus Curtis

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you."
--Dale Carnegie

"The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them."
-- Michel de Montaigne

"Goals give you more than a reason to get up in the morning; they are an incentive to keep you going all day. Goals tend to tap the deeper resources and draw the best out of life."
--Harvey Mackay

"There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."
--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil."
--James Allen

"We are not put on this earth for ourselves, but are placed here for each other. If you are there always for others, then in time of need, someone will be there for you.
--Jeff Warner

"Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities - always see them, for they're always there."
--Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

"There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow."
--O. S. Marden

"Being yourself is not remaining what you were, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure."
-- Sydney Harris

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can weep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.
--Robert F. Kennedy

"Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no matter how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles."
--Og Mandino

I am convinced that attitude is the key to success or failure in almost any of life's endeavors. Your attitude - your perspective, your outlook, how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people - determines your priorities, your actions, your values. Your attitude determines how you interact with other people and how you interact with yourself.
--Carolyn Warner

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
-- Mother Teresa

"The world has a lot of love around, just so few vessels to put it in."
--Author Unknown

"I've got a little voice in my head
It's saying all the things I wish I said
But every time I open my mouth
I try to scream but nothing comes out"
-- Doria Roberts

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

"I generally avoid temptation, unless I can't resist it"
-- Mae West (1940 "My Little Chickadee")

A man goes to the knowledge the same way he goes to the war, completely awake, with fear, respect, and absolute trust in self. To go to the knowledge or to war in any other way is a mistake and whoever does this, lives his life regretting that step.
-- Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan)

It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.
-- Cary Grant

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.
-- Judge Learned Hand

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
-- Appius Claudius Carcus, c. 200 B.C.

I detest that man who hides one thing in the depth of his heart and speaks forth another.
-- Homer

Everything is funny as long as it happens to someone else.
-- Will Rogers

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
--Mohandas K. Gandhi

A joy that's shared is a joy made double.
-- English proverb

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
-- Winston Churchill

All truth is good, but not all truth is good to say.
-- African proverb

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.
-- Francis P. Church "Miracle on 34th Street")

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
-- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 1843

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Action is eloquence.
-- Shakespeare, Coriolanus

If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
-- Thomas Fuller

All races and religions: that's America to me.
-- Earl Robinson

Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.
-- Anonymous

I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
-- Gilda Radner

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.
-- A wise bathroom wall.

"It matters not-Who you love
Where you love-Why you love
When you love-Or how you love
It matters only that you love"
--John Lennon

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
-- William Butler Yeats

To fall into a habit is to cease to be.
-- Miguel de Unamuno

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Nobody becomes guilty by fate.
-- Seneca, 1st Century A.D.

Silence hides nothing. Words conceal.
-- August Strindberg

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."
--Katherine Mansfield

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

OF all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
-- Plato, 4th Century B.C.

Dangers by being despised grow great.
-- Edmund Burke

Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with ignorance.
-- William Blake

I used to be Snow White -- but I drifted.
-- Mae West

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
-- George Santayana

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. - Henry IV

He is well paid that is well satisfied.- The Merchant of Venice
--William Shakespeare

Good families are generally worse than any others.
-- Anthony Hope

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry Adams

"Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve"
--Howard Thurman

"More are killed by word of mouth than by the sword."
-- Leonardo Da Vinci

"We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands upon himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself."
--Jose Ortega y Gasset

In America the President reigns for four years and journalism governs forever and ever.

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
-- Oscar Wilde

I must confess, I was born at a very young age.
-- Groucho Marx

I have really never considered myself a TV star. I always thought I was a neighbor who just came in for a visit.
--Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood"

What is essential is invisible to the eye.
-- Saint Exupery, The Little Prince

"It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image because if you didn't you would have to face the fact that ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on "them." It was bleakly depressing to think that they were "us." If it was "them" then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was "us" then what did that make "me?" After all, I am one of "us." I have certainly never thought of myself as one of "them." No one ever thinks of themselves as one of "them." We are always one of "us." It's always "them" that does the bad things."
--Terry Pratchett

You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share
--Billy Bragg ("The World turned upside down")

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
-- Oliver Wendall Holmes

"Humans have already changed the world several times by changing the way they have had conversations. There have been conversational revolutions...When problems have appeared insoluble, when life has seemed to be meaningless, when governments have been powerless, people have sometimes found a way out by changing the subject of their conversations or the way they talked, or the persons they talked to....Now it's time for the New Conversation."
--Theodore Zeldin

"You can blame people who knock things over in the dark, or you can begin to light candles. You're only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing."
--Paul Hawken

"If you receive a massage every week, you will have 2/3rds less illness."
--Hans Gruenn, MD (Touch Therapy Institute)

"It is not what happens that determines the major part of your future. What happens, happens to us all. It is what you do about what happens that counts."
-- Jim Rohn

"A weed is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

To Get On In Life
Tell me how to get on in life,
said the kettle.
Never be led,
said the pencil.
Do a driving business,
said the hammer.
Aspire to great things,
said the nutmeg grater.
Make light of everything,
said the fire.
Make much of small things,
said the microscope.
Never do anything offhand,
said the glove.
Just reflect,
said the mirror.
Be sharp,
said the knife.
Find a good thing and stick to it,
said the glue.
And that's why the kettle sings as she works, and works as she sings.
--Primatutu

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
--Leo Buscaglia

"What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain."
--Maya Angelou

"You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something."
--Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence

"Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other."
--Mother Teresa

"All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so as of now."
--Pearl S. Buck

"Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
-- Thomas Carlyle

"Live so that your friends can defend you, but never have to."
--Arnold Glasow

"You don't pay the price for success. You enjoy the price for success."
--Zig Ziglar

"The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart."
--Katherine Mansfield

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"
--Rabbi Hillel

"Just as there is a so-called art of waging war, so there is an art of waging peace."
--Marianne Williamson

Fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
--Shirley MacLaine

"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty.
Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
--Jerry Garcia

"Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands."
-Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina)

Science is built 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 Henry Poincare (1854-1912)

Great minds discuss idea,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people.
--Eleanor Rooseveldt [attr]

Great minds have purposes, little minds have wishes.
--Washington Irving

The Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength or our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
--Robert Kennedy

I feel the centipede in me,
Cayman, carp, eagle, and fox.
I am moved by strange sympathies.
--Emmerson

"There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong...
Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention,
and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty...
It takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention..."
--James Nayler (an Early Quaker, who declared above as he lay dying from his many beatings in 1660)(UK)

"...There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats..."
--Albert Schweitzer

"Don't be so self-absorbed. This is about me."
--John Becker "Becker" (Ted Danson character)

I HAD TO SEEK THE PHYSICIAN
I had to seek the Physician because of the pain this world caused me.
I could not believe what happened when I got there--
I found my Teacher.

Before I left, he said,
"Up for a little homework, yet?"
"Okay," I replied.

"Well then, try thanking all the people who have caused you pain.

They helped you come to me."
--Kabir (15th Century Indian poet)

"It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man."
--Ben Franklin

"She who shares most wins! With honesty, commitment and passion anything is possible!"
--Vickie Rock

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
--Emily Dickinson

"A man too busy to take of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools."
--Spanish Proverb

"Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."
--John Howard Payne

"Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence." George F. Will

Everyone Dies, but not everyone lives.
--From movie "The Wisdom of a Pretzel"

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
--J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

"Life is what you do when you are waiting to die.
Sad but true, So, enjoy life."
--Donald Trump

"Invest fully in the life you have to get the life you want."
--Rhonda Britten

" And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
-- Anais Nin

"I cannot understand how we as Americans, possessing such a rich heritage of music and the artists who play it, don't recognize all those talented people. It's a shame that so many of today's young people don't know the work of Art Tatum or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown, to name a few."
-- Ray Charles

When she puts henna on her hands and dives in the river One would think one saw fire twisting and Running in the water.
-- Dilsoz, 18th century AD

We that have our Roots deep in Heaven and Our Branches Kissing Earth
May we Grow deep Roots in Earth and Branches Kissing Heaven Amen
--AmaYah
We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence.
- Philip Pullman