quotes for life and love

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. ~Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays



Baseball is a harbor, a seclusion from failure that really matters, a playful utopia in which virtuosity can be savored to the third decimal place of a batting average. ~Mark Kramer



Tobacco. Tumor causing, teeth staining, smelly, puking habit. ~Arizona Department of Health Services Tobacco Education and Prevention Program ad campaign, created by Riester-Robb Advertising



This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped. ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990



The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people. ~K. Patricia Cross



Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran



I couldn't help but say to Mr. Gorbachev, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. We'd find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985



His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken. ~H.G. Wells



The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. ~Bill Strickland



It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in this world. ~Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort



Sometimes I think my life would make a great TV movie. It even has the part where they say, "Stand by. We are experiencing temporary difficulties." ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com



Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article. ~Bob Frankston



From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential. ~R.D. Laing



There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us. ~F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms



The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues. You can't separate them. They're wedded. ~Henry Miller



If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 8



The power inside you is energy amplified. ~Claire Todae



We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897



I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns. ~Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"



A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. ~Douglas Pagels