Quotation Saturday

RELIGION

“God has no religion.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
― Dan Brown

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”
― Abraham Lincoln

PHILOSOPHY

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 "I never swim upstream with the fish. I swim downstream to see what everyone is running from."

-- Joni Zipp

POLITICS

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”
― Ronald Reagan

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Seven Deadly Sins”
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Quotation Saturday

FRIENDSHIP ~

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. 
~Albert Schweitzer

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad. ~Arnold H. Glasgow
 
If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. ~Edgar Watson Howe

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better. 
~Plutarch

PHILOSOPHY ~
 
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. ~Voltaire

My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. ~Louisa May Alcott
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. 
~Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. 
~George Berkeley

DREAMS ~
 
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare. 
~H.F. Hedge
 
Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you. 
~Marsha Norman

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. 
~Rene Descartes
 
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. 
~Henri Amiel

BOOKS ~
 
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. 
~Charles Kingsley

Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. 
~Judah Ibn Tibbon

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. 
~Francis Bacon

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. 
~Walter Pater

LOVE ~
 
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. 
~Mother Teresa

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. 
~Charles Morgan

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. 
~Kahlil Gibran

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry