Memorable Lines from Jim's Book
Picks 2008
Just like great scenes from the movies...here are some
passages that linger with me. Enjoy!!! (Jim Agnew)
Aug. 8:
"Jewish thought has always been crisis thought."
...Waldo Frank...Bridge: The Drama Of Israel.
Aug. 6:
"Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!"
...Saul Bellow...The Adventures Of Augie March.
Aug. 4:
"No
matter how time and space are defined, it is impossible to be simultaneously in
Brooklyn and Manhattan."
...Isaac Bashevis Singer...A Day In Coney Island.
Aug. 1:
Memorable Lines
"I know there is a God--and I see a storm coming:
If he has a place for me, I beleive I am ready."
...Abraham Lincoln...
July 30:
Memorable Lines
"History Is lived forwards but understood backwards."
...Soren Kierkegaard...
July 28:
Memorable Lines
"He
who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And
if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
...Friedrich Nietzsche...
July 25:
Memorable Lines
"I have no time to be in a hurry."
...Thoreau...
July 23:
Memorable lines
"He who interrupts the course of his spiritual exercises and prayer is like
a man who allows a bird to escape from his hand; he can hardly catch it again."
...Saint John Of The Cross...
July 21:
Memorable Lines
"Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge."
...Isaac Bashevis Singer...
July 18:
"The
one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth."
...Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy...
July 16:
"A specter is haunting Europe---the specter of Communism."
...Karl Marx..."The Communist Manifesto."
July 14:
"We
always find something, eh Didi, to give the impression we exist?"
...Estragon remarks to his pal Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For
Godot."
July 11:
"We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about
what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far."
...Swami Vivekanda...
July 9:
"And then there crept a little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves."
...John Keats...
July 7:
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece
of the continent, a part of the main."
...John Dunne...
July 4:
"Dreams
are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?"
...Henry Havelock Ellis...
July 2:
"Love the world as a mother loves her only child."
...The Buddha"...
June 30:
"Genius...means
little more than the faculty of perceiving in an habitual way."
.....William James...
June 27:
"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."
...Percy Bysshe Shelley...
June 25:
"As
human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the
world--that is the myth of the 'atomic age'--as in being able to remake
ourselves."
...Mahatma Gandhi...
June 23:
"Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of
non-knowledge."
...Isaac Bashevis Singer...
June 20:
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought."
...the Buddha...
June 18:
"A mind that is fast is sick.
A mind that is slow is sound.
A mind that is still is divine."
...Meher Baba...
June 16:
"I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human
beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is
suppressed."
...Joyce Carol Oates
June 13:
"A
certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to
creative thinking as it is to armed robbery."
...Nelson Algren
June 11:
"Would I like more talent? Yes. But you cannot get more
talent".
...Jerzy Kosinski
June 9:
"I
believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is
particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed."
...Joyce Carol Oates...
June 6:
"The
only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest
as nothing."
.....Gustave Flaubert
June 4:
"The tasks of the healthy adult are simply: 'Love and Work'."
...Freud
June 2:
"Where
do we get such men? They leave this ship and they do their job. Then they must
find this speck lost somewhere in the sea. When they find it, they have to land
on its pitching deck. Where do we get such men?"
.....'Admiral George Tarrant.' Fictional character in James A.
Michener's...The Bridges At Toko-Ri.
May 30:
"Men are what their mothers made them."
...Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 28:
"What is there in thee, moon, that thou shouldst move my
heart so potently?"
...John Keats
May 26:
"The
privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
...Joseph Campbell
May 23:
"The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading
it."
.....Anthony Burgess.
May 21:
"The
only time a human being is free is when he or she makes a work of art."
...Friedrich von Schiller.
May 19:
"This
wouldn't be the first time Nicklaus had seen Palmer in the flesh. At the 1954
Ohio amateur championship outside Toledo, Jackie was a fourteen-year-old
qualifier who stumbled upon a dark, solitary figure on the Sylvania Country Club
driving range, raging at ball after ball in a biblical rain.
Nicklaus didn't know the man's identity; he was mesmerized all the same. Under
cover, from about forty yards away, Nicklaus stared at the stranger in the rain
suit for forty-five minutes."
...from ...Arnie & Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf's Greatest Rivalry by
Ian O'Connor (Hougton Mifflin)
May 16:
"The idea exists only by virtue of its form."
...Gustave Flaubert.
May 14:
"The
sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self
protection."
....John Stuart Mill.
May 12:
"Work up imagination to the state of vision."
..William Blake.
May 9:
"Love's
mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
.....John Dunne.
May 7:
"Laughter
is the essence of mankind."
.....Francois Rabelais.
May 5:
"Happy is he who knows the causes of things."
...Lucretius.
May 2:
"Some people suffer mild depression and are totally disabled
by it: others suffer severe depression and make something of their lives
anyway."
....from The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon.
April 30:
"Yet
those who are most anxious to listen to him ask him to be not just another
figure from the real world but an emissary from some other world that doesn't
exist."
...from The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by
Pico Iyer (Alfred A. Knopf)
April 28:
"Formerly,
we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them."
...from Oscar Wilde's Gilbert.
April 25:
"Grief
and trouble bring life, whereas prosperity and pleasure bring death."
...Confucian scholar Meng Tse.
April 23:
"All this is a dream. Still, examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too
wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature."
...Michael Faraday, 1849.
April 21:
"The
mind can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
Milton...Paradise Lost
April 18:
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of
them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven...thy Father
which is in secret...which seeth in secret..."
...St Matthew.
April 16:
"I salute you and thank you for your life."
...an Arabian greeting.
April 14:
"...that where there is despair, I may bring hope...where
there is sadness, I may bring joy..."
...St. Francis.
April 11:
"It is immoral not to tell."
...Albert Camus.
April 9:
"Always look up words in a good dictionary, even when you
know what they mean."
...Paul Scott.
April 7:
"People
don't like using dictionaries when they're reading mere novels."
... Anthony Burgess.
April 4:
"Though
all the fates should prove unkind, leave not your native land behind...."
...Henry David Thoreau
April 2:
"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute.
What you can or dream you can begin it!
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it,
Only engage and then the mind grows heated.
Begin and then the work will be completed."
.....poem of Goethe
March 31:
"The
most intolerable people are provincial celebrities."
...Anton Chekhov
March 28:
"We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope on
earth."
...Abraham Lincoln, 1862.
March 26:
"Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the
way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close
to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those
who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues"
which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of
everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a
hint of the illness in its catastrophic form. But at the time of which i write I
had descended far past those familiar, manageable doldrums."
from Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness by William Styron (Vintage
Books/Random House)
March 24:
Memorable Lines
"He
was interested in the magic, not fake magic, like hiding the ball under the cup,
but real magic, the kind that occurs between people. Nowadays, everybody making
movies want to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick; he was just the
opposite. He was interested in the poetry, lavishing the viewer with story, and
the scope and richness. Look at what you got for your $12 ticket with Anthony."
Sydney Pollack on fellow film director Anthony Minghella, who passed away March
18 in London.
Mr. Minghella won the Best Director Oscar for The English Patient.
March 21:
"I
used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president
or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond
market. You can intimidate everybody."
Former Clinton adviser James Carville.
March 19:
"You're
entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts."
The late U.S. Senator from New York...Pat Moynihan.
March 17:
"We
rarely look closely at that principal operating unit of economic activity: the
human being. What are we? What is fixed in our nature and not subject to
change--and how much discretion and free will do we have to act and learn? I
have been struggling with this question since I first knew to ask it."
from The Age Of Turbulence: Adventures In A New World by Alan Greenspan (The
Penguin Press)
March 14:
"The end is from where we start."
...T.S. Eliott (1942)
March 12:
"It
is not easy to find the right way...You must manage your freedom or drown in
it.'
...Saul Bellow (l957)
March 10:
"The
beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On
the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when
Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty
of spring."
from...Safe Conduct by Boris Pasternak, translated by Beatrice Scott.
March 7:
"Race prejudice is no trouble...when they find out that you
have what they want and can't get it elsewhere, they admit you with a smile."
...Louis Armstrong to the Black Dispatch on music, white folks, and Jim Crowe,
1931.
March 5:
"There
is no ancestor so powerful as one's earlier selves."
...Lewis Mumford (1929)
March 3:
THE BLUES...
..."an impulse to keep to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal
experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and
to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a
near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."
...Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award in 1953 for "Invisible Man" beating
Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man And The Sea."
February 29:
"I can tell my hand what to do and it will do it instantly.
Why won't my mind do what I say?"
Augustine
February 27:
"Full effort is full victory."
Mahatma Gandhi
February 25:
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought."
The Buddha
February 22:
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
Jesus Christ
February 20:
"A people's culture is the incarnation of its religion."
...T.S. Eliot.
February 18:
"It
is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance."
...Henry James.
February 15:
"The
Bible is easily the most beautiful work ever written; whoever wrote it is God to
me."
...Nathan Englander... from Do You Believe: Conversations On God And Religion by
Antonio Monda (Vintage Books/Random House)
February 13:
"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things unseen."
...St. Paul.
February 11:
"Romantic Ireland 's dead and gone."
...William Butler Yeats.
February 8:
"One of the
best friends mankind ever had."
.....George Santayana on Charles Dickens.
February 6:
"The most
perfect artist among women."
.....Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen.
February 4:
He outgrew women, ideas, experiences, only to incorporate
what they taught him into a new, larger, evergrowing Goethe. "I am like a
snake," he said. "I slough my skin and start afresh."
.....Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
February 1:
"Man is
but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed."
Blaise Pascal
January 30:
"Love's
mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book."
John Dunne
January 28:
"Laughter
is the essence of mankind."
Francois Rabelais
January 25:
"Happy is he who knows the causes of things."
Virgil on Lucretius.
January 23:
"I
am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never
find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all
truth of nature, and that man myself...If I am not better, at least I am
different."
from...Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
January 18:
"We
haven't chosen the easiest trail. But we've pointed our herd toward Kansas in an
effort to find a new market for an old product. We call it Tallgrass Beef, a
grass-fed and grass-finished product."
...from...The Prairie Table Cookbook by Bill Kurtis (Sourcebooks)
January 11:
"We need to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of
every passing ship."
--Gen. Omar N. Bradley
January 9:
"To
live--that means for us to change all that we are, constantly, into light and
flame...that art of transfiguration--that is philosophy."
--Nietzsche
January 7:
"I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the
arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified
to be a comedian."
from...Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin (Scribner's)
January 4:
"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of
the past.".
Thomas Jefferson
January 2:
"There
are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
...G.K. Chesterton.
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