Even more important than being kind, be respectful.

British Columbian First Nations spend some time talking about 'respect'.   With good reason.  

 sirdroseph wrote:
 

‘It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind,’”     Some lady in a bookstore somewhere

"Music is the only Religion that delivers."  



Frank Zappa

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.

By seeking and blundering we learn.

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.

Goethe

A thorough evaluation of your culpability should always precede any expression of self pity.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.  

But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be - a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself. 

Elegance is inferior to virtue.  

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil. 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

Lewis Carroll

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only satellites
it’s wrong to wish on space hardware.
– Billy Bragg

 buzz wrote:
 

Dr. Arnold Mayer: We scientists should get out of the lab more often; we might learn something!

 oldviolin wrote: 
More synchronicity!

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

Lord Salisbury (sometime British PM) on campaigning.

The days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that must be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome, choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”
― Albert Schweitzer  

 oldviolin wrote:
 

The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.

Al Mcguire

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Chapter 4, p. 173

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.  Daniel Patrick Moynehan