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"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one." --E.B. White
"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds." --Gilbert K. Chesterson
"What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." --Friedrich Nietzsche
"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love." --Anais Nin
"The truth must dazzle gradually... or all the world would be blind." --Emily Dickinson
"There is a design... Hidden in the chaos as it may be, but it's there. And you have your place in it." -Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Angel the Series, ep 1x21 "Blind Date"
"Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb." --Sir Winston Churchill
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." --Karl Jung
"Genius lasts longer than beauty." --Oscar Wilde
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle
"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." -- C. S. Lewis.
"Some nights the wolves are silent and the moon howls." --graffiti on the Blue Moon Tavern bathroom wall
"I don't think it matters what shape you are, what size, because I mean, particularly women, they get so many things in magazines that say you have to be thin, you have to be this, you have to be that- I think it's about personality, confidence, and the way you project yourself to other people. So if you want be bigger, be bigger. Big is beautiful." --John Barrowman (on 'Loose Women', 12.9.05)
"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane." --Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
"What was the last good idea you had?"
"When I got up this morning I decided not to stick my hand in the blender."
-Dana Whitaker & Natalie Hurley, Sports Night, ep 1x04 "Intellectual Property"
"Hate can pardon more than love." --Henry David Thoreau
Under the hypnotic spell of pleasure
And pain, we live for ourselves and are bound.
Though master of ourselves, we roam about
From birth to birth, driven by our own deeds.
--Shvetashvatara Upanishad
In between
One Heart beat
And the next,
This Breath
Is yours.
--Natan Altermann
"I will not wish thee riches nor the glow of greatness, but that wherever thou go some weary heart shall gladden at thy smile, or shadowed life know sunshine for a while. And so thy path shall be a track of light, like angels' footsteps passing through the night. --words on a church wall in Upwaltham, England
"To all those religious people and conservatives, I just want to tell them; it takes two straight people to make a gay person. Dick Cheney and his wife, who are the most religious and conservative people, created a gay child. So you can't say it is your upbringing. You can't say it is your environment. Because it's not." --Rosie O'Donnell
To laugh is to risk appearing a fool.
To weep is to risk being called sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naive.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
--from the Unitarian hymnal, author unknown
"For starters, accept the fact that we have a Big Bad Wolf hiding inside of us. A darkness that we don't want anyone else to see."
"Do you?"
"Of course I do."
"Really?"
"Mmhmm."
"How do you deal with your Wolf?"
"Well, first of all, I accepted that it was there. I made friends with it. Then I would just let it out for a big meal once in a while."
-Dr Meridian & Dexter Morgan, Dexter, ep 1x08 "Shrink Wrap"
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." --Oscar Wilde
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." --Calvin Coolidge
"To change one's life:
1. Start immediately
2. Do it flamboyantly
3. No exceptions."
--William Jones
"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint... and that voice will be silenced." --Vincent Van Gogh
"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him." --David Brinkley
"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow'." --Mary Anne Rademacher-Hershey
"Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside us." --Oliver Wendell Holmes
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit." --Aristotle
"Trust is like a small miracle. At some point, there's gotta be a leap of blind faith." -Peter Fairchild, Central Park West, ep 1x03 "The Best, False Friend"
"I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace." --The Dalai Lama
"There is no sin except stupidity." --Oscar Wilde
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men. Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all. Then accept it and live up to it." --Buddha, from Kalama Sutta
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Some people believe that before we're born, when we're still in spirit form, we make a deal with the universe, choose the families we're born into. We have different reasons, based on the lessons we need to learn. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I chose mine." -Donna Kozlowski, Judging Amy, ep 1x11 "Presumed Innocent"
"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection." --The Dalai Lama
"And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." --Herman Melville, 'Moby Dick'
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." --Marie Curie
"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers." --Kahlil Gibran
"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." --Douglas Adams, 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. " --The Dalai Lama
"One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy." --Edward Dahlberg
"The universe contains millions of planets. Millions of planets revolving around millions of suns revolving around millions of galaxies all revolving around just one point in the universe. And that point? Is not you." --?
"Truth : the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity. Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities. Outlawed by all governments everywhere. Possession is normally punishable by death." --Richard Childers
"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all." --Isaac Asimov
"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals." --Marie Curie
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
--Kahlil Gibran
"To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give." --Taisen Deshimaru
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love." --Albert Einstein
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." --Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." --Albert Einstein
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstein
"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly." --Arnold Edinborough
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." --Anne Lamott
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." --Robert Wilensky
"When you write, you get this stunned look on your face, like you stuck a fork in a toaster." --Hodgins, Bones, ep 1x05 A Boy In A Bush
"Sometimes we don't do things we want to do so that others won't know we want to do them." --Ivy Walker : The Village
"I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer..." --Rainer Maria Rilke
"You are unrepeatable. There is a magic about you that is all your own." --D.M. Dellinger
"Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. -- Max Ehrmann, 'Desiderata'
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." --Carl Sagan
"Without the awareness of death, everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only because death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery." --Carlos Castaneda
"Never run after a bus or a man. There will always be another one." --Irish proverb
"If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves." --Confucius
"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself." --Anais Nin
"It may offend us to hear our own thoughts expressed by others: we are not sure enough of their souls." --Jean Rostand
"And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." --Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"I have whining down to a fine art. I am a fine whine." --David Hewlett
"I’ve always been an outsider, even in any group I was part of. I’ve always felt like the outside part: the 'Y' in the vowels; the Young in Crosby, Stills and Nash. I just never felt like a part of some place until it was something I built myself. That sense of alienation brings with it feelings of both inferiority and superiority that every nerd nurtures, so I have somewhat antisocial tendencies and I don’t understand humans very well." --Joss Whedon
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." --Ellen Parr
"Treat a man as he is and he will remain so. Treat a man as he can be and should be, and he will become as he can be and should be." --Goethe
"As an adolescent, I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." --Matthew Cartmill
"Physics is like sex: sure it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." --Richard Feynman, physicist
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." --Steven Weinberg
"Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life." --Aristophanes
"For life's not a paragraph, and death I think is no parentheses." --e.e. cummings
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets." --Arthur Miller
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." --Richard Dawkins
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." --Richard Dawkins
"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings." --Richard Dawkins
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian." --Dennis Wholey
"Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways." --William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part II, Act 4, Scene 4
"Re-examine all that you have been told in school, or in church, or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul." --Walt Whitman
"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope." --Maya Angelou
"Don't borrow someone else's spectacles to view yourself with." --Simon Travaglia
"Once you have tasted flight, you will walk with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return." --Leonardo da Vinci
"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see." --Winston Churchill
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." --Albert Einstein
"A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind." --Robert Oxton Bolt
"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal." --Albert Pine
"In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present." --Sir Francis Bacon
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." --George Orwell
"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind." --François de la Rochefoucauld.
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it." --Helen Keller
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." --Plato
"There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins." --Ecclesiastes 7:20
"I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.' --Amy Lowell
"You are ice and fire
the touch of you burns my hands like snow."
--Amy Lowell
"Thy likeness begets such strange self flattery,
That touching myself, all seems done to thee.
Myself I embrace, and mine own hands I kiss,
And amorously thank myself for this."
--Sappho 600 BC
"I'm just... I'm just one of those people who doesn't get to be in a family."
"There's more than one kind of family."
--Dr Brennan and Booth, Bones, 2x11 Judas on a Pole
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." --Mark Twain
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." --Marcel Proust
"Don't be someone else's slogan, because you are poetry." --Gwen Cummings : 28 Days
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." --Samuel Beckett
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." --Plato
"Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers. And for a time, they seemed invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always." --Mahatma Ghandi
"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed." --Herman Melville
"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." --Alfred Hitchcock
"The world moves for love; it kneels before it in awe." --Edward Walker : The Village
"Freedom is a muscle; you have to exercise it!" --Captain Nathan Bridger, SeaQuest, ep 1x02 Treasure of the Mind
"I’m a believer in that. I am a great believer in found families and I’m not a great believer in blood. Although I love my family, even the ones I grew up with, to me I’ve always felt that the people who treated you with respect and included you in their lives were your family and the people who were related to you by blood might happen to be those people but that correlation was a lot less strong than society believes it is." --Joss Whedon
Doctor Who quotes - spanning all seasons/series
"People spend all their time making nice things, and then other people come along and break them." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Enemy of the World" (season 5, original series)
"A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Time Warrior" (season 11, original series)
"There's no point in being an adult if you can't be childish once in awhile." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "Robot" (season 12, original series)
"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Face of Evil" (season 14, original series)
"You're a classic example of the inverse ratio between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Robots of Death" (season 14, original series)
"One good solid hope is worth a cart-load of certainties." -The Doctor, Doctor Who, "Warriors' Gate" (season 18, original series)
"Really though Doctor, tell me. Who are you?"
"Do you know like we were saying, about the Earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the world's turning, and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling 'round the Sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... That's who I am."
-Rose & The Doctor, Doctor Who, ep 1x01 'Rose' (new series)
"One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel..."
-Reinette, Doctor Who, ep 2x04 'The Girl in the Fireplace' (new series)
"We should go down. I'd go. What about you?"
"Oh! Oh, in a second. But then again... That is so human. Where angels fear to tread. Even now, standing on the edge. It's that feeling you get. Yeah? Right at the back of your head. That impulse - that strange little impulse - that mad little voice saying "go on... go on... go on... go over, go on. ... Ha, there it is again. That itch. Go down, go down, go down, go down, go down."
"The urge to jump. Do you know where it comes from, that sensation? Genetic heritage. Ever since we were primates in the trees. It's our body's way of testing us. Calculating whether or not we can reach the next branch."
"No, that's not it. That's too kind. It's not the urge to jump, it's deeper than that. It's the urge to fall!"
-Ida Scott & The Doctor, Doctor Who, ep 2x09 'The Satan Pit' (new series)