Quotations from Brainy Smurf 241

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." --Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Quotations from Brainy Smurf 237

Sir Winston Churchill on quotations:

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more. "

Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 9

Quotations from Brainy Smurf 236

"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” --Howard Thurman

Quotations from Brainy Smurf 233

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

"Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it." --Shakti Gawain, teacher and author (1948- )

"As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. "What kind of a sick perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask, "that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ..." --Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses." --C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections

"The butterfly counts not years but moments and has time enough."
--Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter,
educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)

"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them." --T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

Quotations from Brainy Smurf 226

"So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting--though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false--noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking--is a nice place to start asking questions."

--Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics