Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[AlexBell]

"...I stand before you a feeble woman, naked and alone, having but one weapon of defence, my free spirit, which is proof against sword and fire and scourge. Burn me, if you will; you shall find that there be things over which even the fire is powerless!"

Leucippe, in Clitophon and Leucippe, by Achilles Tatius. 3rd Century CE

[kennyc]

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

[kennyc]

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life."

- John Lennon

[WT Sharpe]

If you imagine chimpanzees with guns, you realize that's us!
— Lori Marino, neurobiologist, biopsychologist, lecturer, and Founder and Executive Director of The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy; to Carl Safina (1955 - ), author, research professor, and founding president of the Safina Center. Quoted by Safina in "The Sexy, Happy Apes We Might Have Been," cnn.com, May 7, 2016.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life."

- John Lennon

Love that quote. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be from Lennon.

http://ianchadwick.com/blog/not-a-jo...ther-bad-meme/

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Love that quote. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be from Lennon.

http://ianchadwick.com/blog/not-a-jo...ther-bad-meme/

Guess Goodreads has got it wrong then, that's where I checked after seeing it on a meme...

Musta been Charles Schulz then:



http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/29/grow-up-happy/

[bfisher]

Now that it seems to be spring here in the Great White North:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

[covingtoncat73]

“But I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"--not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America ...”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields

[covingtoncat73]

"If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by."
Sun Tzu

[kennyc]

"But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

[covingtoncat73]

“'All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.'
'All of them?'
'Sure,' he says. 'Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.'”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

[kennyc]

But what about squirrel stories????

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by kennyc

But what about squirrel stories????

LOL, Kenny. All right...let me see...

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

[covingtoncat73]

And on a lighter note, some Twain...

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

[kennyc]