Love is so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.
- Isaac Watts (1674 - 1748)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)We are made immortal by this kiss, by the contemplation of beauty.
- William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter (June 1919)Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful
- Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)Mercy has converted more souls than zeal, or eloquence, or learning or all of them together.
- Matthew 20:27-28Whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.
Pressure makes diamonds.
- George Patton, Jr. (1885 - 1945)
I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
- William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 - 1891)
Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.
- Tomb of the Spartans at Thermopylae, 480 B. C.
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1623 - 1662)
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 - 1935)
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
- Alexander Hamilton (1755 - 1804)
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
- Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1876
Hell and Chancery are always open.
- Anonymous
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.
- Judge Learned Hand (1872 - 1961)
I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit any body but myself. If people don't like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don't solicit their opinions or votes.
- William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 - 1891)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (121 - 180)Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1817 - 1862)Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining- rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1623 - 1662)
For, in fact, what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1623 - 1662)
Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1623 - 1662)
- John Donne, Meditation 17: Devotions upon Emergent Occassions (1572-1631)No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Death tugs at my ear and says: Live; I am coming.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 - 1935)
Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.
- Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (1824 - 1863)
-Gravestone of E. D. Barber, d. 1851, age 20 yr 7 m. 9 d.Come look on me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me
