Wikiquote:Quote of the day/October 2013 - Wikiquote

The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they see how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

When you're weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I'm on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can't be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.

Facilis descensus Averni:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras.
hoc opus, hic labor est.

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive.

the poet, his presence
ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small
for him,
quietly says, and shyly: "The Poet
never must lose despair."
Then our eyes indeed
meet and hold.
All of us know, smiling
in common knowledge —
even the palest spirit among us, burdened
as he is with weight of abstractions —
all of us know he means
we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it's not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion...

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

The greatest achievements of men, were at first, nothing but dreams of the minds of men who knew that dreams are the seedlings of all achievements. A burning desire, to be and to do, is the starting point, from which the dreamer must take off.