Quotation Saturday

PEOPLE

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.
~Alexander Pope

Groups of people are like a massive Rock, Paper, Scissors war. 
~Daniel

Freaks are the much needed escape from the humdrum. They are poetry.
~Albert Perry

PHILOSPHICAL
 
We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it. ~Albert Szent-Györgyi

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
~Henry David Thoreau

Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!
~Thomas Carlyle

Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.
~John Lancaster Spalding

By daily dying I have come to be.
~Theodore Roethke

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
 
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"
 
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.
~Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
~Homer

The man of masks need not hide. Some see clearly the man inside. ~ Joni Zipp

HAPPINESS
 
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
 ~Robertson Davies


Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
~James Openheim

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
~Margaret Young

SILENCE
 
True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. 
~William Penn

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
 ~Jean Arp
 
I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.
~Richard Steele
 
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
~James Thurber