Wednesday, September 12, 2012

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Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. -Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)


"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves."
Novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).




The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
-Florence Luscomb, architect and suffragist (1887-1985)




Before you judge others or claim any absolute truth, consider that - 
- you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% if the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are travelling at 220 kilometers per second across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not "you". The atoms in your body are 99.99999999999999999% empty space and note of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of a rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don't just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.


Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide. -Eric Sevareid, journalist (1912-1992)

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. -Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)