Quotes By The Day

[conlor]

William Butler Yeats
(6/13/1865 - 1/28/1939)
Irish Poet, Dramatist and Writer (Wild Swans at Coole-Nobel 1923)

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.
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Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
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Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
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The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
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Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.
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All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
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An intellectual hatred is the worst.
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Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
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But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
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Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
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Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
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Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
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Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
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Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
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Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
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How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
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I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
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I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
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I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.
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I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
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If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.
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In dreams begins responsibility.
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Man can embody truth bet he cannot know it.
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
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Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
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This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
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Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
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To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful. ----------
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
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We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
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When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
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Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
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Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
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You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, 'Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.'
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You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

[Snowden]

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

With some men that's all too true!

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

True..

[conlor]

Louis Finkelstein
(6/14/1895-11/29/1991)
American Historian/Rabbi/Theologist (Pharizees)

A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful.
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For as Jews, the problem happens to be more urgent and vital than for others; because the destruction of religion on America will involve the destruction also of the religious training of freedom; and with that our civil liberties.
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From the long range point of view, I do not know of anything we can do more important than to make some contribution to the preservation of religion as a vital force in America.
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I feel very strongly that it is vital for us to constantly keep in mind the fact that the Jewish problem is but a phase of the world problem.
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I hope to devote all of my spare time, which ordinarily would go to research, my summers, and every ounce of strength I can muster to further the project.
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In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.
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It is a grave matter to enter a war, without adequate military preparation; it may prove fatal to come into peace, without moral and religious preparation.
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It therefore become essential for the future of Judaism itself that its advancement should be correlated with a similar effort to advance the cause of religion generally.
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So far as Jews are concerned... there is no safety for them unless they manage to establish higher ethical standards in their own life.
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The road to success, and by that I mean... the possibility of giving the best one has to the cause that one loves most, is not easy.
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We realize that Judaism as a faith can survive only in an atmosphere of general faith.

[conlor]

Erik Erikson
(6/15/1902-5/12/1994)
American Psychologist

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.
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Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
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For when established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
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Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.
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The infant’s first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability.
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Doubt is the brother of shame.
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Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.
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Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

[Snowden]

Very interesting quotes. Interesting man.

[Woodmonkey]

I like this one

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.