As part of my commonplace book, I collect a number of quotes I find all over the place. Once I've gotten a good deal of them, I'd like to share them in Quote Collection posts. This is the first of those posts.
Note on 2/2/2024: This is a "quickie" post I've had in the hopper since it's been a while from the last post. Most of January was eaten up by a trip to New Orleans (debating whether to post about that since I still have yet to write about my Denver/Chicago trip from last July...) and taking care of household stuff since then. Also still - still!! - trying to tidy up the last Interesting Things Roundup covering the last four months of 2023, so that should (hopefully) be finished before I post a new one for January/February 2024 at the end of this month. In the meantime, enjoy this quote collection and see you all soon. - AB
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"The character of a third place is determined most of all by its sunshine and dogs and is marked by a playful mood which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. The third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends. They are the heart of a community's social viability, the grass roots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape." - Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (1991)
"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things are overly straightforward." - Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (1995)
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde
"The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it." - Agatha Christie, The Murder of Peter Ackroyd (1926)
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising and gave it neither power nor time." - Mary Oliver
"There's really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard." - Arundhati Roy
"The amateur believes he must overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist." - Steven Pressfield
“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings... We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.” - Oliver Sacks
"Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die." - David Whyte
"I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'" - Marian Keyes