Flowers rejoice when night is done,
Lift their heads to greet the sun;
Sweetest looks and odours raise,
In a silent hymn of praise.
So my heart would turn away
From the darkness to the day;
Lying open in God's sight
Like a flower in the light.
Henry Van Dyke
Not by appointment do we meet delight Or joy;
they heed not our expectancy;
But round some corner of the streets of life
they of a sudden greet us with a smile.
Gerald Massey
Happy the heart that keeps its twilight hour,
And, in the depths of heavenly peace reclined,
Loves to commune with thoughts of tender power,--
A shining Jacob's-ladder of the mind!
Paul Hamilton Hayne, Sonnet IX
We don't stop playing because we grow old;
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them,
There are two tragedies in life.
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of,
The test of a man or woman's breeding is
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
We grow old because we stop playing !
but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
One is not to get your heart’s desire.
The other is to get it.
he always declares that it is his duty.
how they behave in a quarrel.
We travel, some of us forever,
For my part,I travel not to go anywhere,but to go.
Broad, wholesome,charitable views of men and things cannot
A wise man travels to discover himself.
Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.
to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin
I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth
all of one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Kurt Vonnegut
Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
René Descartes
Don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth.
Rumi
The heart needs not for its heaven much space, nor many stars therein, if only the star of love has arisen.
Jean Paul Richter
Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man -- the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Remember
Freely rendered from the French of Alfred de Musset
Remember,when the timid light
Remember, when the hand of fate
Remember, when the cool, dark tomb
Rappelle-toi, quand l'Aurore craintive
Rappelle-toi, lorsque les destinées
Rappelle-toi, quand sous la froide terre
Henry Van Dyke
(Rappelle-Toi).
Through the enchanted hall of dawn is gleaming;
Remember, when the pensive night
Beneath her silver-sprinkled veil walks dreaming;
When pleasure calls thee and thy heart beats high,
When tender joys through evening shades draw nigh,
Hark, from the woodland deeps
A gentle whisper creeps,
Remember!
My life from thine forevermore has parted;
When sorrow, exile, and the weight
Of lonely years have made me heavy-hearted;
Think of my loyal love, my last adieu;
Absence and time are naught, if we are true;
Long as my heart shall beat,
To thine it will repeat,
Remember!
Receives my heart into its quiet keeping,
And some sweet flower begins to bloom
Above the grassy mound where I am sleeping;
Ah then, my face thou nevermore shalt see,
But still my soul will linger close to thee,
And in the holy place of night,
The litany of love recite,--
Remember!
Rappelle-toi
Alfred De Musset
Ouvre au Soleil son palais enchanté ;
Rappelle-toi, lorsque la nuit pensive
Passe en rêvant sous son voile argenté ;
A l'appel du plaisir lorsque ton sein palpite,
Aux doux songes du soir lorsque l'ombre t'invite,
Ecoute au fond des bois
Murmurer une voix :
Rappelle-toi.
M'auront de toi pour jamais séparé,
Quand le chagrin, l'exil et les années
Auront flétri ce coeur désespéré ;
Songe à mon triste amour, songe à l'adieu suprême !
L'absence ni le temps ne sont rien quand on aime.
Tant que mon coeur battra,
Toujours il te dira
Rappelle-toi.
Mon coeur brisé pour toujours dormira ;
Rappelle-toi, quand la fleur solitaire
Sur mon tombeau doucement s'ouvrira.
Je ne te verrai plus ; mais mon âme immortelle
Reviendra près de toi comme une soeur fidèle.
Ecoute, dans la nuit,
Une voix qui gémit :
Rappelle-toi.
Most people wish to be consoled,confirmed.They want
their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief
systems validated.After all, it hurts to think,
and it's absolute agony to think twice.
Jennifer Stone
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare;
it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca
To express desires, longings, ecstasies, prophecies and passions in form and color; to put love, hope, heroism and triumph in marble; to paint dreams and memories with words; to portray the purity of dawn, the intensity and glory of noon, the tenderness of twilight, the splendor and mystery of night, with sounds; to give the invisible to sight and touch, and to enrich the common things of earth with gems and jewels of the mind -- this is Art.
Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, to a greater or less degree, an artist. The pictures and statues that now enrich and adorn the walls and niches of the world, as well as those that illuminate the pages of its literature, were taken originally from the private galleries of the brain.
The heart is softened by the pathos of the perfect.
Art in its highest forms increases passion, gives tone and color and zest to life. But while it increases passion, it refines. It extends the horizon. The bare necessities of life constitute a prison, a dungeon. Under the influence of art the walls expand, the roof rises, and it becomes a temple.
Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the highest manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, of intuition. It allows us to look at an unmasked soul, to fathom the abysses of passion,to understand the heights and depths of love.
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher. Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines. The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct. The harmony in music teaches, without intention, the lesson of proportion in life. The bird in his song has no moral purpose, and yet the influence is humanizing. The beautiful in nature acts through appreciation and sympathy. It does not browbeat, neither does it humiliate. It is beautiful without regard to you.
Art creates an atmosphere in which the proprieties, the amenities, and the virtues unconsciously grow. The rain does not lecture the seed. The light does not make rules for the vine and flower.
Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that we put ourselves in the place of another. When the whigs of that faculty are folded, the master does not put himself in the place of the slave; the tyrant is not locked in the dungeon, chained with his victim. The inquisitor did not feel the flames that devoured the martyr. The imaginative man, giving to the beggar, gives to himself. Those who feel indignant at the perpetration of wrong, feel for the instant that they are the victims; and when they attack the aggressor they feel that they are defending themselves.
Art civilizes because it enlightens, develops, strengthens, ennobles. It deals with the beautiful, with the passionate, with the ideal. It is the child of the heart. To be great, it must deal with the human. It must be in accordance with the experience, with the hopes, with the fears, and with the possibilities of man. No one cares to paint a palace, because there is nothing in such a picture to touch the heart. It tells of responsibility, of the prison, of the conventional. It suggests a load -- it tells of apprehension, of weariness and ennui. The picture of a cottage, over which runs a vine, a little home thatched with content, with its simple life, its natural sunshine and shadow, its trees bending with fruit, its hollyhocks and pinks, its happy children, its hum of bees, is a poem -- a smile in the desert of this world.
No improvement that takes place in either sex can possibly be confined to itself. Each is a universal mirror to each, and the respective refinement of the one will always be in reciprocal proportion to the polish of the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.
John Ruskin
Love endows us with a sort of personal religion;
we respect another live within ourselves.
Honore de Balzac
Duty makes us do things well,
but love makes us do them beautifully.
Phillips Brooks
The dreamer dies, but never dies the dream,
Though Death shall call the whirlwind to his aid,
Enlist men's passions, trick their hearts with hate,
Still shall the Vision live! Say nevermore
That dreams are fragile things.What else endures
Of all this broken world save only dreams!
Dana Burnet,"Who Dreams Shall Live"
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality;
they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts
performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Diversity is not about how we differ.
Diversity is about embracing one another's uniqueness.
Ola Joseph
From"A Tear & Smile"
THE WIDOW AND HER SON
Khalil Gibran
Night fell over North Lebanon and snow was covering the villages surrounded by the Kadeesha Valley, giving the fields and prairies the appearance of a great sheet of parchment upon which the furious Nature was recording her many deeds. Men came home from the streets while silence engulfed the night.
“Sleep, my dear child; your father is viewing us from Eternity. The snow and thunder bring us closer to him at this time.
“Sleep, my beloved, for this white blanket which makes us cold, keeps the seeds warm, and these war-like things will produce beautiful flowers when Nisan comes.
“Thus, my child, man cannot reap love until after sad and revealing separation, and bitter patience, and desperate hardship. Sleep, my little boy; sweet dreams will find your soul who is unafraid of the terrible darkness of night and the biting frost.”
In a lone house near those villages lived a woman who sat by her fireside spinning wool, and at her side was her only child, staring now at the fire and then at his mother.
A terrible roar of thunder shook the house and the little boy shook with fright. He threw his arms about his mother, seeking protection from Nature in her affection. She took him to her bosom and kissed him; then she say him on her lap and said, “Do not fear, my son, for Nature is but comparing her great power to man’s weakness. There is a Supreme Being beyond the falling snow and the heavy clouds and the blowing wind, and He knows the needs of the earth, for He made it; and He looks upon the weak with merciful eyes.
“Be brave, my boy. Nature smiles in Spring and laughs in Summer and yawns in Autumn, but now she is weeping; and with her tears she waters life, hidden under the earth.
The little boy looked upon his mother with sleep-laden eyes and said, “Mother, my eyes are heavy, but I cannot go to bed without saying my prayer.”
The woman looked at his angelic face, her vision blurred by misted eyes, and said, “Repeat with me, my boy – ‘God, have mercy on the poor and protect them from the winter; warm their thin-clad bodies with Thy merciful hands; look upon the orphans who are sleeping in wretched houses, suffering from hunger and cold. Hear, oh Lord, the call of widows who are helpless and shivering with fear for their young. Open, oh Lord, the hearts of all humans, that they may see the misery of the weak. Have mercy upon the sufferers who knock on doors, and lead the wayfarers into warm places. Watch, oh Lord, over the little birds and protect the trees and fields from the anger of the storm; for Thou art merciful and full of love.’ ”
As Slumber captured the boy’s spirit, his mother placed him in the bed and kissed his eyes with quivering lips. Then she went back and sat by the hearth, spinning the wool to make him raiment.
Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
In French:
Blaise Pascal,Pensées
La science des choses extérieures ne me consolera pas de l’ignorance de la morale au temps d’affliction, mais la science des mœurs me consolera toujours de l’ignorance des sciences extérieures.
The Rule Of Life
IF thou wouldst live unruffled by care,
The poem In the original German
Lebensregel
Willst du dir ein hübsch Leben zimmern,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let not the past torment thee e'er;
As little as possible be thou annoy'd,
And let the present be ever enjoy'd;
Ne'er let thy breast with hate be supplied,
And to God the future confide.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mußt dich um's Vergangne nicht bekümmern;
Das Wenigste muß dich verdrießen;
Mußt stets die Gegenwart genießen,
Besonders keinen Menschen hassen
Und die Zukunft Gott überlassen.
I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin
There is an evening twilight of the heart,
When its wild passion-waves are lulled to rest.
And the eye sees life’s fairy scenes depart,
As fades the day-beam in the rosy west.
’T is with a nameless feeling of regret
We gaze upon them as they melt away,
And fondly would we bid them linger yet,
But Hope is round us with her angel lay,
Hailing afar some happier moonlight hour;
Dear are her whispers still, though lost their early power.
Fitz-Greene Halleck,Twilight
The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.
Charles Brower
Knowledge and Wisdom,far from being one,
Have oft-times no connexion.Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge,a rude,unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed,and squared,and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
William Cowper
The spring,like youth,fresh blossoms doth produce,
But autumn makes them ripe and fit for use:
So Age a mature mellowness doth set
On the green promises of youthful heat.
John Denham
Life is a constantly morphing thing
Life is a constantly morphing thing. Just when you think you know where it’s all headed you wake up the next morning to a completely different view. The landscape has changed along with the seasons, but the trees are the same trees, only your view has changed. So you try to cling to the old things that used to comfort you, clinging to the familiar, but they provide little or no solace. The fears do not subside.
Keri Smith,The Wish Jar Journal
At this point we have no choice but to surrender to the unknown.
that is where the real beauty lies.
It is not in the knowing, the familiar, the expected. But in the embracing of the unknown. a willingness to walk down a new path and to trust that everything is as it should be. perfect. as it is.
Schopenhauer said,”When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.”
Sometimes there are little glimpses of the perfection, amidst the mess. It is at those times we feel blessed beyond measure.
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest,love and death.
George Eliot,Romola
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
Robert Louis Stevenson,"Aes Triplex"
The sea is only beautiful if there's a shore.
Life is like the sea.
It's scaring enough a wide endless sea,
With no port to cast an anchor,
With no land to rest the steps,
Only the ups and downs of the waves and
The blue that can get your sight so lost…
The sea is only beautiful if there's a shore;
When you observe the blue thru the forest,
And the wind blows towards home,
So you know there'll be a destiny,
There'll be a direction to follow even
If you sail more than one day or one life;
The promise of a new land is your guide,
And you know that the sea is a huge world
That's beautiful only if there's a shore.
As you cry, your tears mix with ocean's water,
There's no consolation when both are so blue;
We need a port, like a lighthouse in the darkness,
To be fine, to be safe, to be better than before,
But the sea is beautiful only if there's a shore
Patricky Field
Life(excerpt)
ALL in the dark we grope along,
We do not always win the race,
But he who loves himself the last
Some souls there are that needs must taste
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
And if we go amiss
We learn at least which path is wrong,
And there is gain in this.
By only running right,
We have to tread the mountain's base
Before we reach its height.
And knows the use of pain,
Though strewn with errors all his past,
He surely shall attain.
Of wrong, ere choosing right;
We should not call those years a waste
Which led us to the light.
You know children are growing up when they start
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
It's not that I'm so smart,it's just that I stay with problems longer.
It is not the answer that enlightens,but the question.
He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'
It is not enough to be busy.So are the ants.
The answers will help you in school,
asking questions that have answers.
John J. Plomp
Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Never lose a holy curiosity.
Albert Einstein
Eugene Ionescoin
Voltaire
Charles M. Schulz
The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
but knowing how to question will help you in life.
Warren Berger
The essay Nature
Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, — so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, — is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself.
Chapter IV:Language
Ralph Waldo Emerson,in Nature; Addresses and Lectures
