"It is the pandemian lover who is no good, the one in love with the body rather than with the soul. He is not even, for example, a lasting lover, because he is in love with a thing that is not lasting either. As soon as the bloom of the body fades - which is what he was in love with - he is off and takes wing, having made a foul shame of many speeches and promises. But he who is in love with a good character remains throughout life, for he is welded to what is lasting."
- Plato, Symposium

"Jerome once said to me that nature's greatest mercy could be found in the singular fact that nobody can remember pain. You can remember that you felt pain and you can dread its return, but pain itself, the surgeon's saw across the unanaesthetized bone - that you cannot remember. But moments of joy you can, even the feelings of it. The feelings of making love in peace and excitement can return years later and live."
- Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night

"He [Alexander Payne] makes it feel like a movie and not something you could see on TV. It isn't just MTV drivel. And not that there's anything wrong with MTV. I guess...well there is to me because I think that stuff is fatiguing to the brain. If we're going to have a pop culture that's just going to be a lot of flash images, we're never going to get a chance to look at anything."
- Clint Eastwood

"Pluralist societies are not accidents of history. They are a product of enlightened education and continuous investment by governments and all of civil society in recognizing and celebrating the diversity of the world's people."
- HH The Aga Khan

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering...these are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love...these are what we stay alive for."
- John Charles Keating (a.k.a. "The Captain")

"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life; to put to route all that was not life and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Any child of today who hopes to live into the 22nd century without the aid of medical miracles should look into the past, and consider the lessons today's centenarians took from the 19th century. There's a poetry of common sense in their scheme for immortality. Eat sensibly. Keep walking. Keep knitting. If you can't keep friends, make new ones. Plan so much invigorating work that there's just no time to die. And no regret when you do."
-excerpt from TIME article, How to Live to Be 100, by Richard Corliss and Michael D. Lemonick

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

"Sustainable development could be a good idea, particularly when we take it into the context of the noble intent for which it was originally coined: that we should not take more from the Earth than we give back. It implies solidarity between current and future generations. But I object to the way the term has been diverted to become a meaningless buzzword. It's become an alibi for human greed, for lifestyles that are anything but sustainable. "Sustainable" has taken on a different meaning: it now means what the market will bear, not the Earth."
- Prince Sadrudin Aga Khan, in a September 2nd interview with Newsweek's Carla Power

"Some of us still remember the first time we saw a computer. I saw mine in 1977. It was a Commodore PET 2001 (a Personal Electronic Terminal). It was squat and beige and not particularly personal, and its sole function was to play a game called Hunt the Wumpus, which seemed like a fair and adequate justification for its existence to a second-grader. As the year was 1977, the PET was kept in the school's fallout shelter, which otherwise was unoccupied, owing to a lack of fallout."
- excerpt from TIME article by Lev Grossman, on the wonders of the wireless future

" 'What the hell,' he wrote, 'if you write or say anything really new you might as well just say it in Eskimo for all the attention anyone is going to pay to it. But if you say what millions of people have known for years without being told officially that they know it, they'll call you a genius.' "
- from Voices in Time by Hugh MacLennan

"Chasing the next big thing is as vital to the economy as monetary policy. Tech companies need you to realize how empty your life was in the primitive days before you could email your dishwasher. Celebrity magazines need you to care who the next Ashton Kutcher will be and not to think too much about why we needed the current one in the first place. And the self-help business needs you to despair occasionally of all this trend-hopping so you can go out and buy the newest guide to simplifying your life and living in the moment."
-excerpt from Time article by James Poniewozik, on our society's obsession with "what's next"

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Every now and then life says
'Where do you think you're going so fast?'
We're apt to think it cruel but sometimes
It's a case of cruel to be kind"
-Ron Sexsmith

"Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart."
-unknown

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another TV set, then there'd be peace."
- John Lennon

Everybody Knows...
You can't be all things to all people.
You can't do all things at once.
You can't do all things equally well.
You can't do all things better than everyone else.

Always Believe...
That you are a wonderful, unique person.
That you are a once-in-all-history event.
That life is not a problem to solve, but a gift to cherish.
- Author Unknown

"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- a quote commonly misattributed to Voltaire...see this website for details

"I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process."
- Jane Addams

"If all the years were playing holidays
To sport would be as tedious as to work.
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents."
-from King Henry the Fourth by Shakespeare

"Don�t feel guilty if you don�t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn�t know at twenty-two what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting forty-year-olds I know still don�t."
- from Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrman

"Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they�ve faded. But trust me, in twenty years, you�ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can�t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine."
-from Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrman

The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes their way.

"My uncle said that if people do not go bang bang when they are young, they go bang bang when they grow up."
- Michael T. Kaufman, on why he allowed his son to play with toy guns as a child

If Barbie is so popular, how come you have to buy her friends? :P

"I still believe in paradise, but at least now I know that it's not some place you can look for. Because it's not where you go; it's how you feel for a moment in your life. And if you find that moment, it lasts forever..."
-from The Beach

"If you see the wonder of a fairy tale;
You can take the future even if you fail"
-from I Have a Dream by ABBA