borrowed words, Part Six

So much wisdom (or wit!) packed into such a tight space in these quotes.  Which are your favorites?  Which do you disagree with?

Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed warm, mental fog. ~Joseph Conrad

Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. ~Joseph Conrad

It is the lovers of solitude that have explored the ends of the earth, founded empires, bred races of free and conquering people, extinguished savagery, advanced the growth of science, philosophy, and all learning, and reformed and rejuvenated religion. ~Dr. Frank Crane

Once you accept a thing as true, without knowing whether it is is true or not, you are on the road to mental ruin. ~Dr. Frank Crane

Life is short, but wide. ~Spanish proverb

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it. ~Tallulah Bankhead

Immortality consists largely of boredom. ~Cochrane (Star Trek)

Alas! art is long, and life is short! ~Benjamin Franklin, The Ephemera

It is error alone which needs the support of the government. Truth can stand alone. ~Thomas Jefferson

But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature. ~Thomas Jefferson

Man is the only creature with the capacity for reason, and the predilection to avoid it. ~ J. E. Holbert (?)

People are like alcohol – better in small quantities. ~ unknown

Better a good enemy than a bad friend.  ~ Plato

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. ~Edmund Birk

These do I love:

Old things, old places,

Remembered times,

Familiar faces.

~unknown

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me health, and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am human. Therefore anything that is human is not alien to me. ~ Terence (Roman playwright) 

Wit is thought and words elegantly adapted to the subject. ~John Dryden

[of Chaucer] As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off. ~John Dryden

borrowed words, Part Five

Love these various thoughts on the creative process, reflection, and our interwoven-ness with each other.  That last reminds me of Deitrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together, which I need to re-read.  

I remember being impressed by his assertion that when the Bible refers to the Church as a body, united, it is not making reference to a goal, or an ideal, but to a present reality.  We affect one another, like it or not.  When you are injured, I bleed, for we are one, deny it though we may.  Our fight for independence from each other reminds me of the truism about unforgiveness:  it is like drinking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.  

I need you.  You need me.  There is no way around it.

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe that experience is a substitute for intelligence.  ~Slyman Bryson

The days are just packed. ~Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

Please God, I will live my years with my face to the light, meeting the blows of fate with a joke, the contempt of men with a smile, the plague and mystery of the Unknown in my own heart and in the universe with cheerful faith, and death the best I can when I come to it.   ~Dr. Frank Crane

No artist has any other aim than to show his soul by his work.   ~Dr. Frank Crane

For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears. ~Joseph Conrad, Victory, 1914

The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clearsighted who lead the world. ~Joseph Conrad, Victory, 1914

I feel a most keen sense of self-laudation in that I am doing something the world is willing to pay for. ~Dr. Frank Crane

I wonder if it is written just which souls, of all the millions, shall touch ours? And each one whose personality impinges upon ours, even in the least, leaves some particles of flavor of himself upon us, and we upon him. ~Dr. Frank Crane

The Lord certainly shows His low opinion of money by the kind of folks He gives it to.   ~Dr. Frank Crane

Pessimism is the fine name for cowardice, vulgarity, self-pity, and failure. ~Dr. Frank Crane

The author lays his compelling mind upon the lives of thousands when he has written by the light of his own soul-burning. ~Dr. Frank Crane

It is sweet to mingle tears with tears; griefs, where they wound in solitude, wound more deeply. ~Seneca