Quotes by Historians - Page 96

Try to be happy in this present moment, and put not off being so to a time to come--as though that time should be of another make from this which has already come and is ours.
Thomas Fuller
It is sad that people need alcohol to make them happy.
Habeeb Akande
How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
Michel Foucault
Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.
Karl Marx
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Karl Marx
Without inner peace we have nothing.
Allen Weinsten
When the flames of life are gnawing away at your butt, run faster, quicker, and harder than you've ever run before, because I guarantee it that life will condition you, harder than any trainer ever will.When you state to yourself with the utter most believe, “I will achieve this,” than you are on the path, and this is when life throws obstacles left, right, straight on and which other way, but keep going. Because you will make it
Mark Donnelly
The foundation of wisdom is knowing how to tell when you are totally clueless, lost, and in need of assistance.
A.E. Samaan
It is our harsh fate on earth that body and soul should be so closely bound together; that the soul should have to drag the body along, should be exposed to its vicissitudes, should even respond to them. This primal curse has always weighed heavily upon us; but how much more heavily under a religious law which compels us to endure this outrageous condition; which will not permit our honor, when it is imperiled, to save itself by casting aside the body, and seeking refuge in the world of the spirit!
Jules Michelet
In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.They listened to the warbling of birds and noted the grandeur and the beauties of the forest. The majestic clouds—which appear like mountains of granite floating in the air—the golden tints of a summer evening sky, and the changes of nature, possessed a mysterious significance.All of this combined to furnish ample matter for reflection to the contemplating youth.
Francis Assikinack
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Charles Kingsley
It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.
Paul A. Lombardo
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Rebecca Solnit
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
Johan Huizinga
It's only hard until it becomes easy.
David A. Smith
No mortal man has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.
Sallust
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl Sandburg
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski
...ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.
Washington Irving
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Isaiah Berlin
Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.
Washington Irving
Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.
Carl Sandburg
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
Charles Kingsley
A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
Wise men profit more by fools than fools by wise men.
Marcus Porcius Cato
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
Thomas Fuller
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
Thomas Fuller
I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
John Russell
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
After all, when ‘the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become’ He resolved to ‘wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created – and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground – for I regret that I have made them’ (Genesis 6:7). The Bible thinks it is perfectly all right to destroy all animals as punishment for the crimes of Homo sapiens, as if the existence of giraffes, pelicans and ladybirds has lost all purpose if humans misbehave. The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God repents having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears.
Yuval Noah Harari
If we see some admirable work of human art, we are at once eager to investigate the nature, the manner, the end of its production; and the contemplation of the works of God stirs us with an incomparably greater longing to learn the principles, the method, the purpose of creation. This desire, this passion, has without doubt been implanted in us by God. And as the eye seeks light, as our body craves food, so our mind is impressed with the . . . natural desire to know the truth of God and the causes of what we observe." --Origen(185-254)
Bruce L. Shelley
But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to cooperate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man's world is and what man may be, which is the adventure of mankind, the substance of all my teaching.
H.G.Wells
It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.
Royston Lambert
Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.I am broken and bored,Is there any rewardReassure me, Good Lord,And inform me about it.Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.
Hilarie Belloc
Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.
Carl Lotus Becker
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
John Lothrop Motley
Justin Martyr explained the distinction and the sameness of the Father and the Son with the analogy of a candle. The flame can pass from one candle to another without changing in quality or diminishing the first.
Thomas F. Madden
Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back.
George R. Stewart
For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.
Hilaire Belloc
Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.
Karen Armstrong
Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.
Karen Armstrong
In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One of the strengths of the belief in Antinous was its appeal to the most sensitive and inward of mystical natures as well as to the exuberant, joyous and ecstatic sides of human experience.
Royston Lambert
It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.
Noam Chomsky
There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? ‘None,’ replied Father Andrés. ‘There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.
Piers Paul Read
...evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say 'I believe in gravity," one should not proclaim 'I believe in evolution.
Michael Shermer
The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.
Timothy B. Tyson
Could a being create the fifty billion galaxieseach with two hundred billion starsthen rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
Ron Patterson
It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause
David Hume
I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.
Carl Sandburg
I may not be where I want to be but I'm thankful for not being where I used to be.
Habeeb Akande