Saturday, June 07, 2008

Quotation Saturday

You all know by now that I love a good quotation. Words have such mighty and majestic power: they can make us laugh; they can make us cry; they can make us cower in fear, or stand tall with pride, or melt with love. Name it, and words can make us feel or do it. Wisely chosen words make us respect someone, or not. Words can inspire us, and words can fill us with disgust. Or longing. Or remorse. Or happiness. Or nostalgia. So much strength in words. . .there are no words to fully describe what words can do. Many words, and no words.

And, of course, other people's words are far more powerful than mine. Funnier, too.

"There never was a rule that didn't have to be broken at some time, and the man who doesn't know when to break a rule is a fearful pain in the neck." --William Feather

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or call, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." --James Baldwin

"Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse." --West African Proverb

"Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men or women, it is but a civil term for weakness." --Mary Wollstonecraft*

"So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip." --Will Rogers

". . . he who does not increase his knowledge diminishes it; he who refuses to learn, merits extinction." --Talmud

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." --Tagore

"I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them." --Ezra Pound

"I hasten to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep at it." --Pierre De Beaumarchair

"You don't look in the mirror to see life; you gotta look out of the window." --Drew Brown

"We do not really know anything at all until a long time after we have learned it." --Joseph Joubert

"Happiness is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it." --Anonymous

"Do not assume that the other fellow has intelligence to match yours. He may have more." --Terry-Thomas

"He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft." --J.R. Lowell

"Do not fear when your enemies criticize you. Beware when they applaud." --Vo Dong Giang

"Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side." --Van Wyck Brooks

"It's the most unhappy people who most fear change." --Mignon McLaughlin

"Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have." --Oliver Sacks

"Some people crave baseball. I find this unfathomable; however, I do understand how someone could get excited about playing a bassoon." --Frank Zappa

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." -- Paul Rodriguez

"A headline is not an act of journalism; it is an act of marketing." --Harold Evans

"Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop." --Ovid

"If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God." --George Lois

"All of us are mad. If it weren't for the fact that every one of us is slightly abnormal, there wouldn't be any point in giving each person a separate name." --Ugo Bette

A good quotation is an education, isn't it. Sometimes, a really good one can make my skin tingle and my brain light up in one of those big areas we never use. Maybe a really good combination of words is the spark we need to heat up those empty lobes and see what's going on in there.

*Bonus points if you know what she wrote!

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly