Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Man:
- Son of God,
- "measure of
all things"
- "What a piece of work is a man! how
noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!"
-
Shakespeare, Hamlet
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| That's a man walking on the lunar
surface! It was a defining moment in all of human history. Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin were the first men to step foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969. They had launched
aboard Apollo 11 with Mike Collins on July 16; a national goal of landing a man on the
Moon had been accomplished. |
- Max Theon: "Let no one deceive you. Your capacities,
aspirations and conceptions prove that you are not formed for time, but for
eternity."
- Bertrand Russell: "Men fear thought as they fear nothing
else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death... Thought is subversive and
revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established
institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.
Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the
chief glory of man."
- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm, December 10, 1950:
"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that
man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged
and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,
that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice,
still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure:
he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these
things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding
him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of
man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
- C. Wright Mills: "In our time, what is at issue is the very
nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not
yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of 'human nature'."
- Theodore Roosevelt: "The credit belongs to those who are
actually in the arena, who strive valiantly, who know the great enthusiams, the great
devotions, and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who, at the best, know the triumph of
high achievement and who, at the worst, if they fail, fail while daring
greatly so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know
neither victory nor defeat."
- Plutarch, On Banishment: "Socrates said he was not
an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
- John Merrick, The Elephant Man: "I am not an
animal! I am not an animal! I am a human being."
- Walt Disney: "If you can dream it, you can do it."
- Pablo Picasso: "When I was a child, my mother said to me, If you
become a soldier you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the Pope.
Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."
- Lewis
Carroll (1832-1898):
“I
can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
- Muhammad Ali, before his first fight with Joe Frazier:
"Fifteen referees. I want fifteen referees to be at this fight because there ain't no
one man who can keep up with the pace I'm gonna set except me. There's not a man alive who
can whup me. I'm too fast. I'm too smart. I'm too pretty. I should be a postage stamp.
That's the only way I'll ever get licked."
- Mike Huber on Techwr-L: "I never, ever say "I
can't" about anything. I might say "I don't have the authority to make that
decision" or "Building A is too heavy for me to lift" or "I will need
training before I pilot that space shuttle."
- Lucille Ball, when asked if she had always been outgoing: "I
was shy for several years in my early days in Hollywood until I figured out that no one
really gave a damn if I was shy or not, and I got over my shyness."
- Winston
Churchill: "We
are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm."
- Charles Dickens: "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that
every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that everyone of those darkly
clustered houses encloses it's own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses
its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there,
is, in some of it's imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! (A Tale Of Two
Citites)."
- Hugh Downs: "A happy person is not a person in a certain
set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
- Charles Reed: “Not a day
passes over this earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and
suffer noble sorrows.”
- Anne Frank, diary: "I still
believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
- Dr. James Martineau, The Uncertainties of Life:
"A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and
enable no son of man to discover that he was a son of God. But for the suspended plot that
is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as
after; art sinks to the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry
breaks the chords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic
of the Certainties ..."
- Aldous Huxley: "An intellectual is a person who has
discovered something more interesting than sex."
- Cicero Pro Ligario: "In nothing do men more nearly
approach the gods than in doing good to their fellow men."
- 14th Dalai Lama: "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy
is the best teacher."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi: "It is easy enough to be friendly to
one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the
quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."
- Winston
Churchill: "There
is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."
- John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University, September 12, 1962: "No
man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the
50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in
these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them
advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years
ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter.
Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less
than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago,
during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of
power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones
and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin
and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching
Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight...We
choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the
other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will
serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge
is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we
intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision
last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important
decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency."
- Barbara Outland Baker, Arnold Schwarzenegger's girlfriend from 1969-75:
"His goal setting was just phenomenal. Every New Year's Day he would sit there with
his index cards and create goals, and they were absurd goals. He almost accomplished every
single one of them."
- Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958: "... youth is a quality, and if
you have it you never lose. it."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513: "There is
nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage
than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion
to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend
him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable... It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants
to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free."
- Patch Adams, the movie: a former rival, a fellow
medical student, dour and officious by nature, now realizing and acknowledging the
salubrious patient-benefits of Patch's "excessive happiness," attempts to stop
Hunter "Patch" Adams from leaving the university: "If you leave, I will not
be able to learn your way."
- Abigail Adams, July 1784: Travelling by carriage to London, the
future First Lady witnessed a robbery, the 20-year-old perpetrator captured: "...and
we saw the poor wretch gastly and horible, brought along on foot, his horse rode by a
person who took him." Put-off by the dark spirit of the attending British mob,
Abigail's merciful heart responded: "Tho every robber may
deserve Death yet to exult over the wretched is what our Country is not
accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a
commisiration for the wretched."
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