Favorite Quotations

My collected saying, some for fun, some for education, some for centering.

Also check out these, also linked from my home page: 

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add,
But when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de St. Exupery

We are what we repeatedly do,
Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."
--- Aristotle

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic "temperature" are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet "as a whole."
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter

Do or Do not....
There is no such thing as try."
-- Yoda

It seems to me that in the last analysis there are only two choices. MacBeth's contention that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing and Pierre Teilhard's "something is afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth." Either there is a plan and purpose - and that plan and purpose can best be expressed by the words "life" and "love" - or we live in a cruel, arbitrary and deceptive cosmos in which our lives are a brief transition between two oblivions. The data are inconclusive as to these two choices, at least if we look at the data from a rational, scientific standpoint... I opt for hope, not as an irrational choice in the face of the facts, but as a leap of faith in the goodness I have experienced in my life.
-- Catholic theologian Andrew Greely, quoted in P. L. Berman's "The Courage of Conviction", 1985

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
-- Edwin Land

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, this is no other life but this."
-- Henry David Thoreau

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
-- Pierre Teilhard

The more one considers this infinitely urgent problem of finding an over-all plan for building up the earth, the clearer it becomes that if we are to avoid the road of brute material force, there is no way out ahead except the road of comradeship and brotherhood - and that is as true of nations as it is of individuals: not jealous hostility, but friendly rivalry: not personal feeling, but the team spirit.

-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Activation of Energy

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt before investigation.

-- Herbert Spencer

Don't find fault, find a remedy.

-- Henry Ford

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

 ...A lot of people don't realize what is really going on.  They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things.  They don't realize there's a lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.

Give you an example, Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp.  Suddenly someone will say, "Plate" or "Shrimp" or "Plate of shrimp", out of the blue. No explanation and there's no point in looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness...

-- Repo Man (1984)