Incidentally #3
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
—Thomas Alva Edison
Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
—Mark Twain
Whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things, in short, if anything increases the authority and the power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.
—Susannah Wesley
If we do not have something worth dying for, nor do we have something worth living for.
—Unknown
He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.
—P. G. Wodehouse
Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on others without spilling some drops on yourself.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ah! these mornings! It is slowly dawning on me that I did not get to God by nature, like the poet, but that I have got to Nature by God.
—Oswald Chamber, journal entry dated October 14, 1916
Women know
The way to rear up children, (to be just).
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love's holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemnized,—
But seeing, as in a rose bush, Love's Divine,
Which burns and hurts no,—not a single bloom.—
Become aware and unafraid of Love.
Such good do mothers.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
—C. S. Lewis
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings.
—G. K. Chesterton, 1906
Music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.
—Jean Sibelius
Rye bread will do you good; barley bread will do you no harm; wheaten bread will sweeten your blood; oaten bread will strengthen your arm.
—Irish Proverb
The nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful happens, but those that bring simple little pleasures following one after another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.
—L. M. Montgomery
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
—Frederic Chopin
Simplicity, clarity, singleness: They are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
—Richard Holloway
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
—A. A. Milne
There is nothing so beautiful as a ship at full sail or a woman great with child.
—Unknown
…[T]he slower the walk the better… the most productive pace is a snail's pace. A large part of [a] walk is often spent standing still. A mile an hour may well be fast enough. For [the] goal is different from that of a pedestrian. It is not how far he goes that counts; it is not how fast' he goes; how much he sees.
—Edwin Way Teale, Journey into Summer
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
—C. S. Lewis
Friday, October 15, 2010