Intellectual Poison Quotes

These are just a few quotes that I've enjoyed over the years and felt like tossing up a quick page to display and spread them as best I can in my meager little blog. Got one that you feel has to be included? Email them to me.

Mark Twain - "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." Added 1/11/07

Master Cheng Yen - To be angry is to let others' mistakes punish yourself. To forgive others is to be good to yourself. Added 1/11/07

Unkown - Be the person your dog thinks you are. Added 1/11/07

Thich Nhat Hanh - Your concept or perception of reality is not reality. When you are caught in your perceptions and ideas you lose reality. Added 1/11/07

John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury - To shut your mind, heart, imagination to the sufferings of others is to begin slowly but inexorably to die. It is to cease by inches from being human, to become in the end capable of nothing generous or unselfish, or sometimes capable of anything, however terrible. Added 1/11/07

Denis Waitley - Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude. Added 1/11/07

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) - "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."Added 11/7/05

Acid Drops - A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he's not alone in the way he feels about himself.Added 2/9/05

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945 - - "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."Added 8/30/04 via Intellectual Properties

George Orwell - "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." added 4/5/04

Bill Cosby - I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. 

Joseph Joubert - The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.

George P. Burnham - "I can't do it" never yet accomplished anything: "I will try" has accomplished wonders.

Anonymous - One should never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

Aristotle - "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

Hemingway - "That was not true of Africa. In Africa, a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable."

Herm Albright - "A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."

African proverb - "Somewhere the Sky touches the Earth, and the name of that place is the End."

A few Albert Einstein quotes from Erika and much appreciated.
From "The World as I See It", published in 1931

"How strange is the lot of us mortals. Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people-first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times each day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man...."

Dorothy Thompson, American journalist (1894-1961) - "The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where."