Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.
~ Robert Johnson

***

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.~Edwin H. Friedman

It is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obsesses the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations, wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into innumerable and inane controversies and fancies.
~ Francis Bacon

If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
~ Richard Mitchell

The road goes ever on and on from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can, pursuing it with eager feet, until it joins some larger way where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.
~ Tolkien

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
~ Tolkien

***

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.~George Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

a prisoner before Mr Justice Darling objected to being called 'aprofessional crook':
PRISONER: I've only done two jobs, and each time I've been nabbed.
LORD DARLING: It has never been suggested that you are successful in your profession.
~ Lord Darling

***

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.~William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
~ Wendell Johnson

When asked about whether he would be prepared to die for his beliefs he replied "Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.
~ Bertrand Russell

***

A well tied tie is the first serious step in life.~Oscar Wilde 1854-1900, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

As physicist Freeman Dyson has pointed out, the road to the unified field theory is "littered with the corpses". Neils Bohr once attended a meeting when Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli was presenting his version of the unified field theory. Bohr stood up and said, "Mr. Pauli, we in the back are all convinced that your theory is crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough!
~ Dr Michio Kaku

What can we reason but from what we understand .
~ Alexander Pope.  Edited by Requote 160609

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
~ Newton

***

I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in work-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no other man can ever know.~Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.~Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
~ Bertrand Russell

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
~ Samuel Johnson

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
~ Daniel J. Boorstin

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
~ Doug Larson Flametree

Two things never come together - contentment and envy.
~ Ibn Gabirol

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
~ Socrates

***

"If everybody minded their own business," the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, "the world would go round a deal faster than it does".
~Lewis Carroll 1832-1898, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. 6 (1865)

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
~ Niels Bohr

Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?
~ Socrates

***

Painted on the side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.~Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It