The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
-----James Russell Lowell
A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.
-----Prince Klemens von Metternich
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing his mind.
------Somerset Maugham
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
--------Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
-------Jules Renard
Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.
-------Ben Hecht
Some very meaningful quotes from George Bernard Shaw.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Some more from Krishnamurti...
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
Nationalism is a disease.
From Ramana Maharshi ...
--All bad qualities centre round the ego. When the ego is gone, Realisation results by itself. There are neither good nor bad qualities in the Self. The Self is free from all qualities. Qualities pertain to the mind only.
--Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.
--If there is anything besides the Self there is reason to fear? Who sees the second? First, the ego arises and sees objects as external. If the ego does not rise, the Self alone exists and there is no second.
--The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
excellent stuff.
I keep forgetting to make my contributions. I will add some tonight before I hit the sack.
this is an awesome thread. I have been enjoying it.
You can't shoot an idea.
------Thomas E. Dewey
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
-------Victor Hugo
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attention.
-------Oscar Wilde
