Showing posts with label Quotations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quotations. Show all posts

Mark Twain on Reading

AJ Heil | 12:43 PM | 3 Comments

I find this to be a very relevant and powerful statement.
Some people may argue that a person who knows how to read has an advantage over someone who doesn't know how to read because they still posses the ability and potential to read.  However, Mark Twain implies that simply having the ability to do something does not do a person any good if he or she does not choose to utilize it [the ability].
1. "For after all the foundation of eloquence, as of everything else, is wisdom." -Cicero

2. “The human mind has the capacity to rationalize to itself any and all human actions.” -Michael C. Brannigan

3. ‎"Nature has herself appointed that nothing great is to be accomplished quickly, and has ordained that difficulty should precede every work of excellence..." -Quintillian

4. ‎"For human well-being mostly depends not on what people have but, among other things, on what they do with what they've got." -Daniel M. Haybron

5. "For many of us, the majority opinion constitutes the litmus test of whether something is morally right or wrong. This is logically absurd." -Michael C. Brannigan

Kids These Days...

Greg Heil | 4:00 AM | 3 Comments
Creative Commons photo credit
A week or so ago I read this post by Silouan that is full of quotations from the ancients about how bad the youth of their day were. It's funny, because much of the same language that those ancients used is being used by the parents and elders of today.

I asked a few life questions in a recent post, and this was Silouan's response:

"There are probably four or five people who see you at work all day, every day. They know how you deal with stress, how you treat them and your customers and your boss, how much effort you put into your tasks (unspiritual as they may seem) and how much extra work you pick up or else leave for the next shift to worry about.

While rummaging through items from my old house (which we are now selling and moved out of), I ran across a relatively recent edition of Bike Mag. 

Knowing that I hadn't read much, if anything, from the contents of the magazine, I quickly flipped open to look across various article titles and photographs to see if anything intrigued me from that issue (to my disgrace, an action that I took before knowingly chucking it into the garbage can). 



Photo Credit
"The best among men do not remember hostilities; they see the virtues, not the faults, and they do not stoop to enmity. It is the lowliest that hurl insults in a quarrel, Yudhisthira; the middling ones return the insults, but the best and the steady ones never babble about hostile insults, spoken or unspoken. The good only remember the good that was done, not the hostile deeds, acknowledging it because they have confidence in themselves." 
--Dhrtarastra in the Mahabharata

Many times, I feel like it is so ingrained in our nature to want to lash back at those who attack us. We may even have good reasons and good logic on our side, but as this quotation illustrates, that is still not the best course of action.