Profound Quotes Interlude
by Deep Thinkers
Le Penseur in the Jardin du Musée Rodin, Paris 14 June 2015
Our Country, Our Times
Rainer Maria Rilke
"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."
"Be patient toward everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.. Do not search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything... Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, evolve some distant day into the answer."
Slouching Toward Bethlehem - Joan Didion
“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.”
Herman Melville
"Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity."
"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity."
Max Born
"There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method."
Joyce Carol Oates
"We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language."
"Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate."
"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."
Bertrand Russell
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history."
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
"The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible."
John Steinbeck
“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”
“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
Elizabeth Blackwell
“A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.”
“It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
"To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."
"The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law."
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
"Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg."
Aleister Crowley
"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach."
"The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing."
Eleanor Roosevelt
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
"When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor."
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."
Niels Bohr
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature."
"Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it."
Ken Kesey
"To hell with facts! We need stories!"
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."
"There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy."
"The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths."
Anthem - Leonard Cohen
"I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me
Ring the bells that still ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in"
I hope you are willing to subscribe to my free newsletter by clicking the button below. Many future stories will remain exclusive to the paid subscribers. So I would be grateful if you do go on to subscribe to BioMedWorks Newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year.