Quotation Saturday

ACTION

Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out. 

~Italian Proverb
 

Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done. 

~Betsy Cañas Garmon
 

Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action. 

~Walter Anderson

All know the way; few actually walk it. 

~Bodhidharma

HUMOR
 

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. 

~Christopher Morley

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. 

~Francis Bacon

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

~James Thurber

A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles. 

~Mignon McLaughlin

BEING YOURSELF
 

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. 

~e.e. cummings, 1955

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. 

~Raymond Hull
 

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself. 

~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 

~Oscar Wilde

SOLITUDE
 

Man loves company even if it is only that of a small burning candle. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. ~Henry David Thoreau
 

Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. 

~Paul Johannes Tillich

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest. 

~Antonio Porchia