quotation	attribution	on_frontpage
Only connect.	E. M. Forster, Howard's End	1
'Kindness' covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.	Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir	1
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.	Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac	1
The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.	Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature"	1
At all times and in all places and under all circumstances, Give your attention to people and events one at a time; Otherwise you will never give your attention to anything. Be as honest as you know how; Otherwise you will always rage against your own lies. Curb your will to control events and people; Otherwise you will always be unhappy. Give freely to others; Take freely what others give: Otherwise you will give and receive nothing.	Balto's Tonic, Dick Ringler, Mogador	1
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.	Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey	1
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.	Agnes Repplier	1
The Thames is liquid history.	Sign over the bar in Trout Tavern, Wolvercote, outside Oxford	1
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.	Muriel Rukeyser	1
I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'	Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue	1
Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.	Lillian Hellman	1
The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it--can we even remember it--until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it.	Ursula Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea	1
'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose...' 'I am responsible for my rose,' the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.	Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince	1
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.	John F. Kennedy	1
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.	Graham Swift, Waterland	1
Dear One, This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen, something I think I can write better than say. For me it is one of the loveliest of the summer's hours, and all the details will remain in my memory.... But most of all I shall remember the Monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives. But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly--for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural. For the monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end. That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it--so, I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.	Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman, September 10, 1963 (as she was dying of cancer), in Always, Rachel, pp 467-8	1
My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.	Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea	1
To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.	W. S. Merwin, The Miner's Pale Children, 132	1
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.	Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone	1
It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.	Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, Chapter 1	1
This is a history. But there is only one history. It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished. All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions--makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entireties, diffusing petty comfort or petty despair. The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and brief passage of time from that enormous tapestry. Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against the injustice, against the imposture. It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves. Look about you in all directions -- rise higher, rise higher! -- and see hills beyond hills, plains and rivers.	Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day	1
The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that waters play on rock, root, and rapid.... This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.	Aldo Leopold, "Song of the Gavilan," A Sand County Almanac	1
The voyage of discovery lies not in finding landscapes but in having new eyes.	Marcel Proust	1
Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a name. Once, at the beginning of time, when Segoy raised the isles of Earthsea from the ocean deeps, all things bore their own true names. And all doing of magic, all wizardry, hangs still upon the knowledge--the relearning, the remembering--of that true and ancient language of the Making. There are spells to learn, of course, ways to use the words; and one must know the consequences, too. But what a wizard spends his life at is finding out the names of things, and finding out how to find out the names of things.	Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan	1
I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.	Marge Piercy, "To Be of Use"	1
O, it's enough to be on your way. It's enough just to cover ground. It's enough to be moving on. Home: better build it behind your eyes. Carry it in your heart, Safe among your own.	James Taylor, "It's Enough To Be On Your Way"	1
Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.	Malebranche
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.	Edmund Burke
We must be the change we want to see in the world.	Gandhi
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.	Margaret Mead
I can't seem to let go of the wondering. That's a good thing. But meanwhile, I may give my life meaning by throwing myself recklessly into it daily, as if something astonishing is happening and I am part of it. It is and I am.	Robert Fulghum
You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'	George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Pt. I, Act 1 (1921) (a favorite quotation of Robert F. Kennedy, quoted by Edward M. Kennedy in his eulogy for his brother)
Intellectual understanding is one of the best versions of the Golden Rule: Listen to others as you would have others listen to you. Precise demonstration of truth is important but not as important as the commmunal pursuit of it. Put in terms of Kant's categorical imperative, When addressing someone else's ideas, your obligation is to treat them as you believe all human beings ought to treat one another's ideas.	Wayne C. Booth, My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.	John F. Kennedy
At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. . . . I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible. . . .	Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
That, very roughly indeed, is the political, or theological, or politico-theological background to the play. But what of the social, or economic, or socio-economic, which we now think more important? "The economy was very progressive, the religion was very reactionary. We say therefore that the collision was inevitable, setting Henry aside as a colorful accident. With Henry presumably we set as as accidents Catherine and Wolsey and Anne and More and Cranmer and Cromwell and the Lord Mayor of London and the man who cleaned his windows; setting aside indeed everyone as an accident, we say that the collision was inevitable. But that, on reflection, seems only to repeat that it happened. What is of interest is the way it happened, the way it was lived. For lived such collisions are. 'Religion' and 'economy' are abstractions which describe the way men live. Because men work we may speak of an economy, not the other way round. Because men worship we may speak of a religion, not the other way round. And when an economy collides with a religion it is living men who collide, nothing else (they collide with one another and within themselves).	Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, "Preface"
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil the benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that! More: (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on Roper) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.	Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.	Graham Swift, Waterland
My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.	Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.	Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958, 57
As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past, and the mind busies itself with what Henry James has called 'the irresistible reconstruction, to the all too baffled vision, of irrevocable presences and absences, the conscious, shining, mocking void, sad somehow with excess of serenity.	John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, Pilgrim's Way: An Essay in Recollection
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.... The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.	Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.... That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.... Is history taught in this spirit? it will be, once the concept of land as a community really penetrates our intellectual life.	Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.	Muriel Rukeyser
Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.	Paul Klee
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.	Francis Bacon
...to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.	Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], describing the goal of Romanticism
We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.	Antoine de Saint Exupéry
There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.	Graham Greene
Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.	Lillian Hellman
The past is never dead. It's not even past.	William Faulkner, Requium for a Nun
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.	Eugene O'Neill
History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.	Max Beerbohm
Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.	Herodotus
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.	Karl Marx
Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making.	Joseph J. Ellis
History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us.	Alexander Herzen (in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia)
To grow old is to lose everything.	Donald Hall, Affirmation
As every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future.	Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology, 1714
The past is ...altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.	T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1920
I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'	Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue
If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.	Geoffrey Elton
Writers write about what worries them.	Alistair MacLeod
What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.	Raymond Williams, Ideas of Nature
Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.	Raymond Williams, Ideas of Nature
A considerable part of what we call natural landscape has the same kind of history. It is the product of human design and human labour, and in admiring it as natural it matters very much whether we suppress that fact of labour or acknowledge it. Some forms of this popular modern idea of nature seem to me to depend on a suppression of the history of human labour, and the fact that they are often in conflict with what is seen as the exploitation or destruction of nature may in the end be less important than the no less certain fact that they often confuse us about what nature and the natural are and might be.	Raymond Williams, Ideas of Nature
It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.	Raymond Williams, Ideas of Nature
Ideas of nature, but these are the projected ideas of men. And I think nothing much can be done, nothing much can even be said, until we are able to see the causes of this alienation of nature, this separation of nature from human activity, which I have been trying to describe. But these causes cannot be seen, in a practical way, by returning to any earlier stage of the idea. In reaction against our existing situation, many writers have created an idea of a rural past: perhaps innocent, as in the first mythology of the Golden Age; but even more organic, with man not separated from nature. The impulse is understandable, but quite apart from its element of fantasy--its placing of such a period can be shown to be continually recessive--it is a serious underestimate of the complexity of the problem. A separation between man and nature is not simply the product of modern industry or urbanism; it is a characteristic of many earlier kinds of organized labour, including rural labour.... The point that has really to be made about the separation between man and nature which is characteristic of so many modern ideas is that however hard this may be to express--the separation is a function of an increasing real interaction. It is easy to feel a limited unity on the basis of limited relationships, whether in animism, in monotheism, or in modern forms of pantheism. It is only when the real relations are extremely active, diverse, self‑conscious, and in effect continuous--as our relations with the physical world can be seen to be in our own day--that the separation of human nature from nature becomes really problematic.	Raymond Williams, Ideas of Nature
Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.	Laurence Sterne
It is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover. And most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge.	Eudora Welty
The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it--can we even remember it--until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it.	Ursula Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.	F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, final paragraphs
He had known wonder in this land, truth and magic in it, sorrow, loneliness, and pain in it. He had known love in it, and for the first time in his life he had tasted there the bright, delusive sacraments of fame. Therefore it was no foreign land to him. It was the other part of his heart's home, a haunted part of dark desire, a magic domain of fulfilment. It was the dark, lost Helen that had been forever burning in his blood--the dark, lost Helen he had found. And now it was the dark, found Helen he had lost. And he knew now, as he had never known before, the priceless measure of his loss. He knew also the priceless measure of his gain. For this was the way that henceforth would be forever closed to him--the way of no return. He was out. And, being out, he began to see another way, the way that lay before him. He saw now that you can't go home again--not ever. There was no road back. Ended now for him, with the sharp and clean finality of the closing of a door, was the time when his dark roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could be left to feed upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-absorbed designs. Henceforth they must spread outward--away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that holds man's spirit prisoner--outward, outward towards the rich and life-giving soil of a new freedom in the wide world of all humanity. And there came to him a vision of man's true home, beyond the ominous and cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now, in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future.	Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, Chapter 44, The Way of No Return
Some illusions...are the shadows of great truths.	Nathaniel Hawthorne
If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.	Isaac Babel
The last days of this glacial winter are not yet past; we live in 'creation's dawn.' The morning stars still sing together, and the world, though made, is still being made and becoming more beautiful every day.	John Muir, in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, p. 72
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the earth rolls.	John Muir, in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, p. 438
To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.	Robert Penn Warren
Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a “sense of place,” we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having “a sense of self” means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.	William Kittredge, The Nature of Generosity
No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.	Wallace Stegner
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.	N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
People need many different ways of reinforcing their bonds with the land to guarantee that their souls develop an ample capacity for affection and care. Coming to know and use a place responsibly is connected to slowly perceiving in an ordinary landscape a beauty that is more than scenic.	Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons
If you don't know where you are, you probably don't know who you are.	Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (often attributed to Wendell Berry)
To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.	Carson McCullers
It does not take much to make symbols ambivalent. History inscribed in a landscape is free-running and full of wild notions.	Greg Dening
It’s not down in any map; true places never are.	Herman Melville
It is the tale, not he who tells it.	Stephen King, Epigraph for Different Seasons (containing the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption)
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.	Jorge Luis Borges, Afterword to The Maker in Collected Fictions, 327
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. “Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her.	Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, The seasons' difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say 'This is no flattery: these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.' Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in every thing. I would not change it.	William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.i.1-17 (Duke Senior speaking in the Forest of Arden)
A complete togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of their fullest freedom and development.  But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!	Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, translated by J. B. Greene and M.D. Herder, 1945 (slightly modified)
At the outset, the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not end there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed 'souls,' or 'selves' or 'minds' to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees ... We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications ... And thus we arrive at a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as 'things in our own mind.' Apparently we had no mind of the sort required. The Subject is as empty as the Object. Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened.	From C. S. Lewis's preface to D. E. Harding's Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.	Aldo Leopold, Round River, 165
Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.	Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
'And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,' said Carl softly. 'Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.'	Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
The aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years' time by those who are now children and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life all my energies to it.	Leo Tolstoy
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.... It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing.	John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.	Barney Kilgore
Time is the element in which we exist.... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.	Joyce Carol Oates, Marya
What is history but a fable agreed upon?	Napoleon
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.	Roy P. Basler
There's history, and then there's the future, too. In between the two is the fascinating moment when the world changes.	Margriet de Moor
We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past.	Edwin Muir, Into Thirty Centuries Born, Collected Poems, 249
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, I think, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.	Robert Penn Warren
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!	Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, December 27, 1831
In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.	William Maxwell
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.	Oliver Cromwell
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.	M. King Hubbert
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I said nothing. Then they came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist, so I said nothing. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I said nothing. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.	Martin Niemöller
It's a striking feature of democratic politics that it enables those who don't believe in democracy to vote and those who don't believe in government to govern.	Steve Kantrowitz
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?	John Maynard Keynes
Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.	Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians, NRSV, 5:19-21
The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.	Ortega y Gasset
I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.	E. B. White
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.	Immanuel Kant, Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.	Albert Camus
There's nothing you can't get done in this town if you're willing to let someone else take the credit.	Anonymous, referring to politics in Washington, D.C. (but broadly applicable everywhere)
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.	Anonymous
The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.	Otto von Bismarck
Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or histories,--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about.	Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.	John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (on novelists)
The field cannot be well seen from within the field.	Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.	Barbara Kingsolver
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.	Max Weber
since feelings come first, who cares about the syntax of things?	e e cummings
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.	W. S. Merwin, The Miner's Pale Children, 151
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-- We murder to dissect.	William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned
Recipes are not assembly manuals. Recipes are guides and suggestions for a process that is infinitely nuanced. Recipes are sheet music.	Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart. (Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C'est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c'est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.)	Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything -- though it might have been a good thing if [that person had] also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough...that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept...	Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.	Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.	Agnes Repplier
Every Night & every Morn Some to Misery are Born. Every Morn & every Night Some are Born to sweet delight.... Joy & Woe are woven fine, A Clothing for the Soul divine; Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine.... It is right it should be so; Man was made for Joy & Woe; And when this we rightly know Thro' the World we safely go....	These three stanzas are quoted out of order from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," in the sequence in which they appear when set to the haunting melody of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Call in Five Mystical Songs" to create one of my all-time favorite hymns, "Every Night and Every Morn."
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.	Sir Edmund Hillary
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.	George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Man and Superman
My life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is a privilege to do for it whatsoever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.	George Bernard Shaw
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.	Maya Angelou
We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.	John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity
Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorise on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think, we are, at the same time, doing something for ourselves.	Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois, Feb. 22, 1842
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.	Walter Lippmann
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening.	Ralph Waldo Emerson
Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire.	Anatole France
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.	William Arthur Ward
To teach is to delight.	Horace
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.	Henry Adams
Teachers open the door, but you enter by yourself.	Anonymous
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.	Chinese Proverb
Vocation: the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.	Frederick Buechner
Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them.	Werner Heisenberg
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.	D. T. Suzuki
There is another world, and it is in this one. (Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci....)	Paul Eluard
Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.	African proverb
One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.	Chinese proverb
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.	Ornette Coleman
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.	Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never waste a crisis.	Unknown (a variant, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” is often attributed to the Stanford economist Paul Romer)
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a sniffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.	Albert Einstein
The central project of environmental law has been to marry wonder to power.	A. Dan Tarlock, Environmental Law: Ethics or Science?
Wonder is ignorance which is aware of itself as ignorance.	Robert Harrison
This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.	Henry David Thoreau
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.	Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.	Aldo Leopold, The Farmer as a Conservationist
Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.	Wendell Berry, The Pleasures of Eating
A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.	Kenneth Burke
Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked.	Oscar Wilde
The whole of nature...is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive....	William Ralph Inge
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.	Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its destiny, and comic in its existence.	George Santayana
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.	C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet.	T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.	Tony Judt
When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life.	Verlyn Klinkenborg
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.	Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.	Gerard Manley Hopkins
Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?	Gordon Lightfood, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Landscape is not the land, but an idea of a land waiting to be settled by an alien dream.	Jóhann Hjálmarsson
Literary criticism should arise out of a depth of love. In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as we were when we took it up. To borrow an image from another domain: he who has truly apprehended a painting by Cézanne will thereafter see an apple or a chair as he had not seen them before. Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers. We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communiuon we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it. In this attempt at persuasion originate the truest insights criticism can afford.	George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism
Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.	Robert Louis Stevenson in letter to Sidney Colvin, February 1887
We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.	Robert Frost
I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.	Oliver Wendell Holmes
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention? To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes.	Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream.	Henry David Thoreau
Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them--in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.	Walter Benjamin
The Thames is liquid history.	Sign over the bar in Trout Tavern, Wolvercote, outside Oxford
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.	Winston Churchill
What is the city but its people?	Shakespeare, Coriolanus, III:1
We will never bring disgrace on this our City by an act of dishonesty or cowardice. We will fight for the ideals and Sacred Things of the City both alone and with many.  We will revere and obey the City's laws, and will do our best to incite a like reverence and respect in those above us who are prone to annul them or set them at naught.  We will strive increasingly to quicken the public's sense of civic duty.  Thus in all these ways we will transmit this City, not only not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.	The Athenian Oath
Call Me Trim Tab	Buckminster Fuller's gravestone, Mt. Auburn Cemetery
Chance favors the prepared mind.	Louis Pasteur
There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences.	Robert Ingersoll
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false.... No one is offended at not seeing everything.	Blaise Pascal
Maturity consists in no longer being taken in by oneself.	Kajean von Schalggenberg
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.	Henry David Thoreau, Walking
If a thing is not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.	Unknown
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.	L. P. Jacks, Education through Recreation (1932), p. 1
Yes, I suppose that's so, said Sam. And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually--their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on--and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same--like old Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?	J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, from The Stairs of Cirith Ungol in The Two Towers
It has been a long trip, said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault. You must never feel badly about making mistakes, explained Reason quietly, as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons. But there's so much to learn, he said, with a thoughtful frown. Yes, that's true, admitted Rhyme; but it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.	Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
As the cheering continued, Rhyme leaned forward and touched Milo gently on the arm. They're shouting for you, she said with a smile. But I could never have done it, he objected, without everyone else's help. That may be true, said Reason gravely, but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do. That's why, said Azaz, there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn't discuss until you returned. I remember, said Milo eagerly. Tell me now. It was impossible, said the king, looking at the Mathemagician. Completely impossible, said the Mathemagician, looking at the king. Do you mean— stammered the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint. Yes, indeed, they repeated together; but if we'd told you then, you might not have gone—and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible. And for the remainder of the ride Milo didn't utter a sound.	Norton, Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Death. The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang--home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death's arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit--waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast--all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven's blessings with us, died and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep'... Death is a kind nurse saying, 'Come, children, to bed and get up in the morning'--a gracious Mother calling her children home.	John Muir, John of the Mountain: The Unpublished Journals fo John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 439-40
Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever.	Gandhi
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.	James Baldwin
It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.	Ian McEwan
To love another person is to see the face of God.	Les Misérables, Epilogue (Finale), Lyrics by Alain Boublil, Translation by Herbert Kretzmer, based on novel by Victor Hugo
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?	Hillel, Avoth, 1:14
Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption.	Israel Baal Shem Tov
You know, I've been thinking. Everything comes together. It's me. I chose this. I chose all of this. This rock, this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. In itts entire life, ever since it was a bit of meteorite a million billion years ago, there in space, it's been waiting to come here, right right here. And I've been looking toward it my entire life, the minute I was born. Every breath I've taken, every action, has been leading me to this crack beneath the surface.	Aron Ralston, 127 Hours, movie script
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.	Martin Luther King
I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance Never settle for the path of least resistance Living might mean taking chances But they're worth taking Lovin' might be a mistake But it's worth making Don't let some hell bent heart Leave you bitter When you come close to selling out Reconsider Give the heavens above More than just a passing glance And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance I hope you dance....	Lee Ann Womack, I Hope You Dance (songwriters: Mark D. Sanders, Tia Sillers)