This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Our dear race, born without courage but very brave, born with a flickering intelligence and yet with beauty in its hands. What animal has made beauty, created it, save only we? With all our horrors and our faults, somewhere in us there is a shining. This is the most important of all facts. There is a shining.
Live the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
My destination is no longer a place, but a new way of seeing.
My mind is never so pleasantly empty as when I'm chopping wood.
NORWEGIAN WOOD
I found this one in the excellent book
Norwegian Wood—Chopping, Stacking, and Drying the Scandinavian Way
by Lars Mytting. It's a ridiculous premise for a book,
I know, but I bought it as a Christmas gift for my grandpa
and since then he, I, and my buddy Joe have all read it
cover to cover and loved it. Check it out if you've ever
enjoyed a good fire!
Fun fact: Norwegian Wood is also the title of a great Beatles song— Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).
Attack this day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind!
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
The best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Everyone who is honest is interesting.
He who laughs most, learns best.
Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure some of them are dirt.
The mountains are calling, and I must go…
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
The same people who worry about thinking machines today were certain that the introduction of calculators would usher in an era of knuckle-dragging imbecility.
You put your mind to it, you try to do right by people, you listen, you don't run around with the answers, eventually a door opens up. Be prepared and take advantage of it.
The sky is not my limit... I am.
If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Hard work won't guarantee you success, but without hard work, I can guarantee you won't have success. What do you choose?
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
If God created the world, where was He before Creation?... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to having it done it to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps—what more can the heart of a man desire?
Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and an unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.
All I know is that I know nothing.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
No one will be able to read the great book of the Universe if he does not understand its language, which is that of mathematics.
It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature.... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
If you want something you’ve never had, you have to be willing to do something you have never done.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
Even in war’s darkest days, in most places in the world, absolutely nothing is happening.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Men do not learn very much from the lessons of history, and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
We’ve all seen the movies where the hero is in trouble, and he’s surrounded by twenty people, but you know he’s going to get away because he’s the hero. So you don’t really feel any fear for him. I want my readers, and I want my viewers to be afraid when my characters are in danger.
The truth is a stubborn thing; it doesn't go away.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Well, I'm accidentally in the middle of the Death Star here. I should probably figure out how the thing works before I leave.
Do we want our children one day to say to us, ‘Wait a minute, you knew this was a problem and you ignored it?’
When you see the world, the world sees you.
Confidence: It's the food of the wise man but the liquor of the fool.
Mathematics is the vocabulary for your own intuition.
We still educate our children by batches. It's like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture.
CHANGE THE PARADIGM
Sir Ken Robinson was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to education and the arts. His TED Talks have over 66 million views. The one below is my personal favorite, but don't stop there. His most popular, Do Schools Kill Creativity? has over 50 million of those alone.
His book, The Element—How Finding your Passion Changes Everything, has has a profound impact on my life and work.
Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
I don’t know what God has in store for me—I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure when I face him, he’s not gonna ask me, ‘How many football games did you win, Larry Gilmer?’ He’s gonna say, ‘How many lives did you change?’
If you're not ready for love, how can you be ready for life?
Let me win, but if I cannot win let me be brave in the attempt.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Fortune favors the bold.
He is happy who can trace effects to their causes.
The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences.
I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness... overpowering, overwhelming. But then, I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.
I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend it's resistless fascination for me. After all, the line trail is the best... I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.
Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.
THAT WASN'T EINSTEIN, EINSTEIN.
This quote is commonly (mis)attributed to Albert Einstein, however, no one seems to be able to find any evidence of Uncle Al ever saying (or writing) it. Cherne may have said it, but even that is hard to track down. It has also been attributed to a guy named Stuart Walesh, but that wasn't until the 1980s.
Ben Shoemate did some extensive research into this, but was unable to solve the mystery of the exact origin of this quote. So who really said it first? We may never know.
It’s nice to be important. It’s more important to be nice.
You are organized when you have what you need, when you need it.
Our system is based on creating wealth for the few, unfortunately at the expense of the health of the many.
Not only humans, but also every other organism in the cosmos, as well as the planets and moons on which they thrive, would not exist but for the wreckage of stars. So you're made from detritus. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.
CONQUERING EVEREST
Edmund Hillary and fellow mountaineer Tenzing Norgay were the first two people to reach the summit of the tallest peak on Earth, Mount Everest, in 1953. The grueling expedition required extensive planning and the climbers displayed remarkable self-control during the ascent. Hillary reportedly summarized the lesson of the adventure with this eloquent quotation.
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