Quotes to inspire and reflect

Though old the thought and oft expressed,

Democ’acy gives every man

We have . . . defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil: the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine [Charles Babbage’s visionary computer] weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

The Analytical Engine [Charles Babbage’s visionary computer] has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

[ On Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:] That sort of thing wears thin—for when one’s cynicism becomes perfect and absolute, there is no longer anything amusing in the stupidity and hypocrisy of the herd. It is all to be expected—what else could human nature produce?—so irony annuls itself by means of its own victories!

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,

I hear in the chamber above me

As unto the bow the cord is,

And the night shall be filled with music,

From the waterfall he named her,

The bards sublime,

Into each life some rain must fall,

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

Each morning sees some task begin,

There is a Reaper whose name is Death,

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience .

The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.

[ Diary entry, 5 Aug. 1939 :] Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life.

I . . . understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. . . . Women’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade.

The Wave of the Future.

“The sun,” said Mr. Bull, “never sets on English dominion. Do you understand how that is?” “Oh, yes,” said the Indian, “that is because God is afraid to trust them in the dark.”

[ After being requested to remove Ulysses S. Grant from command because he drank too much :] Can you tell me where he gets his whiskey? . . . Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.

He [Lincoln] used to liken the case to that of the boy who, when asked how many legs his calf would have if he called its tail a leg, replied, “Five,” to which the prompt response was made that calling the tail a leg would not make it a leg.

Mr. Lincoln [told] the story of the young man who had an aged father and mother owning considerable property. The young man being an only son and believing that the old people had lived out their usefullness assassinated them both. He was accused, tried, and convicted of the murder. When the judge came to pass sentence upon him and called upon him to give any reason he might have why the sentence of death should not be passed upon him, he with great promptness replied he hoped the court would be lenient upon him because he was a poor orphan.

[ Remark at conference of cabinet members and generals, 10 Jan. 1862 :] If General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it.

[ Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nov. 1862 :] So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

If the end brings me out all right, what’s said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

[ Recollection of comment by an old man at an Indiana church meeting, ca. 1810 :] When I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad, and that’s my religion.

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.

[ Commenting on his loss to Stephen A. Douglas for senator from Illinois in 1858 :] I feel just like the boy who stubbed his toe— too d —— d badly hurt to laugh and too d —— d proud to cry!

Dear Madam,—I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

[ On the possibility of his reelection :] I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that “it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”

By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing . . . . The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator , while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens . . . to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and part of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; . . . And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

The signs look better. The Father of Waters [the Mississippi River] again goes unvexed to the sea.