Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

–Hermann Hesse

Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.

–Ernest Benn

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

–Alfred Korzybski

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

 –Joan Didion

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance / Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

–Ogden Nash

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

 –Theodore Roosevelt

There are people who can endure personal tragedies and private griefs exacted by the nation only if they feel the nation itself is worthy.

–Bill Moyers

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like… Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

 –D.H. Lawrence

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.

 –David Brinkley

In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form.

–George Santayana

When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

 –Henry Beston, Foreword The Outermost House

 

My attraction for mosquitoes is so great that people who have some reason to walk near stagnant ponds or swampy marshes sometimes ask me along as a means of drawing off attackers, the way a quarterback who intends to pass might first send a decoy halfback into the line without the ball in the hope of having him jumped on by the opposition’s largest and most vicious linemen.

 –Calvin Trillin

Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

 –Margaret Mead