“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
Never to speak about oneself is a very noble piece of hypocrisy.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
“Just because the Bible says “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” it doesn’t follow that Mary had a little lamb.”
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats. scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
what you will love most is to walk on the earth
“One of the attractions of the UU approach to religion and life is caught in the assertion that divinity and spirit are to be found not through blind faith but through finding and sending down roots to the deepest part of one’s unique self. As is true in botany, those roots spread out into the wider community and can nourish us and give us a healthy life. How do we know when we are living in the best place for those roots to grow? In so much as we do indeed “grow a soul” we should consider carefully the garden in which that soul grows.” - Bob Lane
“For a generous psychology.
We help a person more by giving him a favorable image of himself than by constantly reminding him of his shortcomings. Each individual normally strives to resemble his best image. Can be applied to teaching, to history, to philosophy, to politics. We are for instance the result of twenty centuries of Christian imagery. For two thousand years man has been offered a humiliating image of himself. The result is obvious. Anyway, who can say what we should be if those twenty centuries had clung to the ancient ideal with its beautiful human face.” Albert Camus — Notebooks
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -Albert Einstein
“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible”.
“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable , 1959, p.418)
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
In those early days faculty were busy coordinating course credit with Canadian universities. This often involved phone calls. Notice in the picture of the first location of the college that little building that was our coffee gathering place. One day while the history chair was getting a coffee a call came for her from the history chair at the U of T. The secretary took the call and explained that Helen was unable to take the call right then because “she is in the outhouse”.
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His response was something like, “I didn’t realize . . .”!
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