Random Quotes

"It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive." -Edward Abbey

"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer." -Ansel Adams

"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied — it speaks in silence to the very core of your being." -Ansel Adams

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
-William Blake

"The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth." -William Blake

"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals; I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." -A. Whitney Brown

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?" -Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them." -William Clayton

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." -Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior

"Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change." -Marquis de Sade

"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should." -Max Ehrmann

"Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live." -Albert Einstein

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." -Albert Einstein

"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them." -Ian L. Fleming

"Oh, the of it all." -Edward Gorey

"Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love." -Annie Hall

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." -Stephen Hawking

"I think that computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." -Stephen Hawking

"Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away.
Past touch and sight and sound,
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day."
-A.E. Housman

"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never escape it alive anyway." -Elbert Hubbard

"Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books." -Carl Jung

"You are not truly alive until you have found something that you are willing to die for." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

"What we know is not much. What we don't know is enormous." -Pierre Simon de Laplace, French astronomer

"If you ever read any anthropology, one of the first things you'll notice is that primal cultures simmer up all of their mystery and magic and power and ask their teenagers to drink deeply." -Grace Llewellyn

"There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine." -HP Lovecraft

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it." -W. Somerset Maugham

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." -John Muir

"I do not paint what I see, but what I saw." -Edward Munch

"Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." -Pablo Picasso

"I learned something about obsession during my time with the Fenshaws. I learned it isn't madness or even foolishness, though madness and foolishness have given it a bad name. How could anyone who wasn't obsessed compose a symphony or write a thousand-page novel? How could anyone who wasn't obsessed cross an uncharted ocean in a seventy-foot sailboat? No one sneers at people like these, but they will sneer at someone whose obsession drives them to fill a house with starving cats or to build a half-size model of the Brandenburg Gate out of matchsticks. I almost feel that someone who lives without an obsession has a poor sort of life." -Daniel Quinn, in After Dachau

"Why yes — a bulletproof vest." -James Rodges, his final request before the firing squad

"There is no wealth but life." -John Ruskin

"There is really no such thing as bad weather, just different types of good weather." -John Ruskin

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." -Bertrand Russell

"Life is shiny, isn't it?" -scarecrow on the Ishmael Guestbook

"Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another." -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Our lives are frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand." -Henry David Thoreau

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -Henry David Thoreau

"Shallow brooks are noisy. Deep rivers flow in silent majesty." -unknown

"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire

"We live in a society that is becoming more and more technologically advanced while its individuals are becoming less and less technologically capable. People in indigenous societies knew how to gather materials for, make and maintain everything they used, whereas today, for example, we can turn a knob on the stove or strike a match to produce fir, but take away the manufactured matches and mass-produced propane stove and most of us would die before we could start a fire to keep us warm and cook our food. This is why I've spent days turning rawhide into buckskin and hours at a time chipping away at a piece of obsidian trying to make a knife blade. It's exciting and empowering to know how to make your own tools, shelter, and clothing, and it gives me a more intimate ecological consciousness." -former unschooler Kyla Wetherell, quoted in The Teenage Liberation Handbook

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live." -Lin Yutang

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