Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers. On the Shortness of Life
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Quote:- Were knowledge all, what were our needTo thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?
Author:- Christopher Brennan
Category:- poetry
Quote:- Were prayers of murderers, when fighting on the right side of the war, ever heard—let alone answered?
Letters from Home
Author:- Kristina McMorris
Category:- philosophy
Quote:- Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain
Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
Author:- Clarence Darrow
Category:- science
Quote:- Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Writings on an Ethical Life
Author:- Peter Singer
Category:- philosophy
Quote:- Were you created only for this world that youspend all your time on it?
Author:- Master Nursi
Category:- Life
Quote:- Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
Author:- Stacey O'Brien
Category:- science
Quote:- Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.
Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
Author:- Thich Nhat Hanh
Category:- hope
Quote:- Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.
Author:- Denis Parsons Burkitt
Category:- science
Quote:- Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why.
The Children of Men
Author:- P.D. James
Category:- science
Quote:- What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
Author:- Rachel Held Evans
Category:- poetry
Quote:- What a curious power words have.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Author:- Tadeusz Borowski
Category:- best
Quote:- What a feat to go forward and [backward] at the same time.Astonishing.
Author:- Xilaristw
Category:- hope
Quote:- What a greater crime. Than loss of time.
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry as Well for the Champion or Open Countrey, as Also for the Woodland or Several, Mixed in Every Moneth, with Houswifery, Over and Besides the Book of Houswifery
Author:- Thomas Tusser
Category:- time
Quote:- What a hope! What an anchor for the soul facing any storm! God reigns supreme, above all. He is in control of everything and nothing happens in this life without His knowledge and eternal purpose. That is dynamite right there.
This Stormy Life
Author:- Paddick Van Zyl
Category:- hope
Quote:- What a lovely thing a rose is!"He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
The Naval Treaty - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story
Author:- Arthur Conan Doyle
Category:- hope