Famous Quotes from Marcus Tullius Cicero

Vicente Romero Redondo Art

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic.

I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle
to those who want to learn.

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and
more numerous than those of the body.

A youth of sensuality and intemperance delivers
over a worn-out body to old age.

Law stands mute in the midst of arms.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Superstition is a senseless fear of God.

Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity, and beasts, by nature.

Death approaches, which is always impending over us like the stone over Tantalus; then comes superstition, with which he who is racked can never find peace of mind.

Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk.

Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something, as a support, which ever in the sincerest friend is most delightful.

No liberal man would impute a charge of unsteadiness to another for having changed his opinion.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

For fear is but a poor safeguard of lasting power; while affection, on the other hand, may be trusted to keep it safe for ever.

Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

Thanksgiving by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Music:
Bilitis-GHEORGHE ZAMFIR

Thanksgiving
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hang about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives
And conquers if we let it.

There's not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past's wide measure.

But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble.
Farseeing is the soul and wise
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o'er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

Thanksgiving Quotes

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, — a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.
George Herbert

Ah! on Thanksgiving day....
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?
John Greenleaf Whittier

Excerpt from the novel"The mother" by Maxim Gorky

Music:
Brian Crain & Rita Chepurchenko - Solitary Hill

Gustave Leonard de jonghe Art

From the novel "The mother" (Excerpt)
Maxim Gorky

Pavel arose and began to pace the room,folding his hands behind his back.

It goes all right," he said. "... At the same time, however, life itself is opening our eyes to its bitter meaning and is itself showing man the way to accelerate its pace. We all of us think just as we live."

"True. But wait!" Rybin stopped him. "Man ought to be renovated-- that's what I think! When a man grows scabby, take him to the bath, give him a thorough cleaning, put clean clothes on him--and he will get well. Isn't it so? And if the heart grows scabby, take its skin off, even if it bleeds, wash it, and dress it up all afresh. Isn't it so? How else can you clean the inner man? There now!"

Pavel began to speak hotly and bitterly about God, about the Czar, about the government authorities...

Here the mother intervened. When her son spoke about God and about everything that she connected with her faith in him, which was dear and sacred to her, she sought to meet his eyes, she wanted to ask her son mutely not to chafe her heart with the sharp, bitter words of his unbelief...and said firmly: "When you speak of God, I wish you were more careful. You can do whatever you like. You have your compensation in your work."
Catching her breath she continued with still greater vehemence: "But I, an old woman, I will have nothing to lean upon in my distress if you take my God away from me."

Her eyes filled with tears.

"You did not understand us, mother!" Pavel said softly and kindly.

"Beg your pardon, mother!"

"I did not speak about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom they threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all of us to the evil will of the few."

They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. Mark you, mother, God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him. But we have become, not like God, but like wild beasts! ... mother; we must cleanse him! They have dressed him up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted his face in order to destroy our souls!"

... In the heart and in the mind. There's the rub. It's this that makes all the trouble and misery and misfortune. We have severed ourselves from our own selves. The heart was severed from the mind, and the mind has disappeared. Man is not a unit. It is God that makes him a unit, that makes him a round, circular thing. God always makes things round. Such is the earth and all the stars and everything visible to the eye. The sharp, angular things are the work of men."

Luna de Paris-Raúl Di Blasio

Voltaire's philosophical reflections

To find out who rules over you,simply find out
who you are not allowed to criticize.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend
to the death your right to say it.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make
you commit atrocities.

The man who says to me 'believe as I do or God will damn you will presently say believe as I do or I will murder you.

The discover of what is true,and the practice of that which is good, are the two most important objects of philosophy.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames;
philosophy quenches them.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy;
the mad daughter of a wise mother.

An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade
before you instruct.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition,but certainty is absurd.

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague
or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they
can cure them are the maddest of all.

To the living we owe respect,but to the dead we owe only the truth.

I die adoring God, loving my friends,
not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Understanding Fanaticism by Voltaire

Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: "You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so." Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth.
Voltaire

comprendre le fanatisme
Voltaire

Mais, monsieur, en étant persuadés par la foi, des choses qui paraissent absurdes à notre intelligence, c'est-à-dire, en croyant ce que nous ne croyons pas, gardons-nous de faire ce sacrifice de notre raison dans la conduite de la vie. Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois: Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur. Une faculté de votre âme étant une fois tyrannisée, toutes les autres facultés doivent l’être également. Et c’est là ce qui a produit tous les crimes religieux dont la terre a été inondée.
Voltaire

From Paris with Love-Richard Clayderman

Freedom begins by Victor Hugo

Freedom begins where it ends ignorance;
Because giving freedom to an ignorant is like
giving a weapon to a mad man.
Victor Hugo

On spirituality :Ridding God of His Maggots by Victor Hugo

It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots.
Victor Hugo

My heart & the flowers by Heinrich Heine

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odours. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams!
Heinrich Heine, "The Hartz Journey"

Content by William Shakespeare

My Crown is in my heart, not on my head:
Not deck'd with Diamonds, and Indian stones:
Nor to be seen: my Crown is call'd Content,
A Crown it is, that seldom Kings enjoy.
William Shakespeare

On Friendliness,Love & Openness by Anais Nin

I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.
Anais Nin

Perspective by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Leonid Afremov Art

It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a person for several years thinking he or she was a wild animal, and you would regard that person with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his or her soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard.The reverse also happens.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,The House of the Dead

Your day:Don’t just get through it; get from it by Jim Rohn

Most people are just trying to get through the day.Be committed to learn to get from the day.Don’t just get through it; get from it. Learn from it.Let the day teach you.Join the university of life. What a difference that will make in your future.Commit yourself to learning.Commit yourself to absorbing. Be like a sponge. Get it.
Jim Rohn

Raul Di Blasio-Corazón de niño(The heart of child)

Inspirational Quotes on Cheerfulness & joy

there is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
Voltaire

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it ;better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
Thomas Carlyle

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
Joseph Addison

Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment: cheerfulness keeps up a kind of day-light in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
Joseph Addison

what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
Leo Tolstoy

Reflections on Love, Life & Spirituality by Vincent Van Gogh

Secret Garden - Cantoluna

Vincent Van Gogh Art

The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.

What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum… Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such — be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God.

To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one… When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.