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Quotes of the Day: 14 Quotes for the Weekend
“How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.” – Jane Austen
“Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers, and are famous preservers of good looks.” – Charles Dickens
“The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” – Joan Didion
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” – George Eliot
“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.” – Benjamin Franklin
“My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.'” – Paul Johnson
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C. S. Lewis
“You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” – David McCullough
“There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“A Gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel — or an axe or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good — and as bad — as the man who carries it. Remember that.” – Jack Schaefer
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” – Roger Scruton
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. – Leo Tolstoy
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. -Tom Wolfe
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Have a quote you’d like to share today? Please add it in the comments. Have a quote you’d like to write about another day, please sign up here (of course, you’re welcome to use any of the quotes here to create a separate post). If you have thoughts about the quotes above and don’t want to post separately, please share in the comments. Happy Friday!
Published in Group Writing
I might differ. Someone who’s been arrested for something they didn’t actually do, remains a conservative. A liberal is someone who’s been arrested for something they actually did, and thinks there should be no consequences.
Thank you for those thought provoking quotes.
Interesting. I was thinking that the person arrested was guilty and yet appalled by the reality of incarceration and the frustration of the legal process. Your interpretation makes me think of Solzhenitsyn and the way that the Soviets used arrests to instill fear and doubt in everyone. Surely not a method limited to the Soviets.
Arguably, the incident with the San Francisco “unhomed” person who decided to live on the street in front of a private business (an art gallery, I believe), is illustrative. The business owner who tries to remove the person harming his business, is arrested. I don’t think that turned him liberal.
[Sigh.]
Be careful trusting the experts.
I find each of these quotes to be a treasure.
“We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” – C.S. Lewis
“If a man claims to be a woman, which he can never be, and demands to be addressed as such, he is not merely asking for right etiquette. He is demanding that we enter his delusion, or his lie. It is not true. He is demanding that believers in God fall in worship of an idol. Some idols are hideous, like Moloch, and some are beautiful, like Dionysus. The Hebrew prophets did not care. They did not condemn the idols for their style. They condemned them for being false. We have names for people who accustom themselves to speaking what they know to be untrue. We call them scoundrels, or cowards.”
– Anthony Esolen, Sex and the Unreal City
Thanks for this quote. Sounds like I need to read this book!
There are so many insightful Lewis quotes. Maybe I should do compilations for the most quotable authors. Or someone else may want to do it.
“Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.”
All good quotes but I love this one best.
“My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.’” – Paul Johnson
That could be my personal motto.
“It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.”
― Hannah More