Auguste Rubin

When this famous artist was asked how he managed to create his remarkable statues, he said: "I choose a block of marble and chip off whatever I don't need."

Alexis de Tocqueville

A French political scientist, wrote a four volume "Democracy in America" in 1854 after a visit to our young nation of only 60 years. Much acclaimed at the time, he included his fears for our survival as a democracy: "But it would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. -------- (reducing them) to industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

Ambrose Bierce

From "The Devil's Dictionary": An egotist: "A person more interested in himself than in me."

Montaigne Again

His favorite retreat was his tower with its library of classics, at least a thousand, bound in tooled leather. His favorites were Plutarch, Seneca, St. Augtustine, Virgil, Erasmus, and especially Lucretius. He wrote: "The familarity I have with them, and the aid they afford me in my old age, and my book merely framed of their spoils, binds me to maintain their honor."

Yogi Berra

"You better be careful if you don't know where you're going because you might not get there."

Ideas

From Kenneth Walker's "Ventures with Ideas": "They (ideas) are powerful agents capable of taking possession of us and of propelling us in a direction in which, at the beginng, we had no desire to go. There are ideas so powerful indeed that they are capable of destroying us body and soul." (Re: Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf")

Andy Rooney

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things it makes it easier to do don't need to be done."

The Rosetta Stone

The soldier of Napoleon's army who stumbled across the strange black stone in the desert of Egypt in 1798 knew not that he had found the key (by its inscriptions) to unlocking the secrets of a lost civilization of such duration (4000 years) as to make Napoleon's empire - which lasted less than his lifetime - seem like a minor historic event.

Will Rogers

"An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out."

Pearl Buck

Fron her Credo 1939. "We are born free, in other words, of every sort of predestination. In each of us there is a little germ of individual being, compounded, it may be, of everything, inheritance, environment, and all else, but the compound itself is new. It is forever unique." Unique freedom? Positive force? What does that mean? She says "It means roving imagination and daring thinking and ready laughter and quick appreciation and intense interests and wide observation."

Regret

Somerset Maugham has written of us going lonely, side by side, unable to know and unknown. And Longfellow's poignant thought comes to mind - of ships that pass in the night - a look, a voice, then darkness and a silence.

A Poet; A Philosopher

Robert Frost: "All thought is a feat of association: having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew."
John Locke: "The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have."

Michel de Montaigne

French Renaissance thinker and writer best known for his "Essays". On the theme that small learning makes for presumption, great learning for humility, he wrote "To really learned men has happened what happens to ears of wheat: they rise high and lofty, head erect and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen with grain in their ripeness, they begin to grow humble and lower their horns."

News Media

I have to keep reminding myself that the news media is a commercial enterprise appealing to our fascination with the aberrations of society and that the vast majority of viewers and listeners are decent law abiding citizens.

Nakaye Toju

17th century Japanese philosopher - his thought: "Man's mind is the mind of the sensible world, but we have another mind which is called conscience. This is reason itself. It is infinite and eternal. As our conscience is one with the divine or universal reason, it has no beginng or end. If we act in accord with such reason or conscience, we are ourselves the incarnations of the infinite and eternal, and have eternal life."

Ambrose Bierce

A cynical man whose forte was satire. A definition from his "The Devil's Dictionary": "Responsibility, n. detatchable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

He had the old Welsh motto "Y Gwir yn erbyn y byd" put into the tiles of the entrance hall of his home at Aldworth England. Translation: "The Truth Against the World." I believe this was an affirmation of his conviction that science and religion can be reconciled.

Helen Keller

She had so many words of wisdom for us. From her Journal, 1938: "Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

J. Samuel Bois

A Canadian psychologist, epistemologist. In his book "Explorations in Awareness" he speaks of some of our human weaknesses: "We have a tendency to believe in the cosmic validity of generally accepted statements" and further: "We listen to people and we run ahead of them completing what we think they are going to express. Or we form an opinion from the first sentence of a paragraph before the author had time to build before us the multidimensional structure of his thoughts."

Winners

I have observed that there are two kinds of winners in life. There are those who win because of their superior qualities. And there are those who win because they refuse to be beaten. I admire those who won't concede defeat. They have confidence but not arrogance, courage not fear, disappointments at times but never despair, determination, perserverance, and faith in themselves and their goals.

Fredrich Hayek

This renowned economist summarized his life's work by publishing "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism." - a ringing endorsment of capitalism, individual freedom, free market economy. The fatal conceit: the belief "that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

My Good Fortune

I was trained and commissioned in the Infantry when called into active duty in World War 2. But I was assigned to the Ordnance Department's chemical munitions program at Edgewood Arsenal Md. The odds of me being here today thereby were greatly improved. 2nd Lts of Infantry were poor life insurance risks in World War 2.

Henry James

His metaphor for the fortunate - those ever curious, ever ready to learn: "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensensibility a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air borne particle in its tissue."
Much is throwaway, but worth it for the "keepers".

The Boy Scout Oath

I happened upon my Eagle Scout badge and the Oath, unsaid for years, flashed to mind:
"On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight."
How refreshing in today's cynical world!

Malcolm Muggeridge

Britsh journalst, teacher, author, a favorite on William F. Buckley's (no longer) TV show "Firing Line." His thought: "The worst that could happen to the Christian religion would be to be provable in humanistic terms. It would be disastrous. For me, embracing Christianity is a question of faith not of rational proof, but at the same time a reasonable faith. Provided one accepts the initial jump of the Incarnation, everything else follows."

Ephesians 3-20 (KJV)

"Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us."

Erich Fromm

Social theorist, psychotherapist, self described atheistic mystic wrote: "Man transends all other life because he is, for the first time, life aware of itself. Man is in nature, subject to its dictates and accidents, yet he transends nature because he lacts the unawareness which makes the animal a part of nature - as one with it."

My Cane

I continue to practice with it daily, but eliminating the walker remains but a goal - not an imminent reality.

Bernard Lewis

Islamic fanatics are no mystery to this eminent historian. For 14 centures Islam and Christiandom fought, he wrote. For nearly a millennium Islam won, conquering Syria,Palestine, Egypt, Sicily, Spain,Portugal, and parts of France. But , in 1683, the Turks failed in their siege of Vienna, were defeated, and thus began Islam's decline. Lewis sees today's Islamic fanatics as would-be avengers seeking to reclaim Islam's place in the world.

True?

"Smug complacency ages - obsessive curiosity renews."
I once wrote it. I still believe it.

Greeting

"Hello there - my you're looking great!"
(Another little white lie.")