October 2012

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time? -Jane Smiley, novelist (b.1949)

Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

The worst kind of people are those who confuse kindness for weakness. -Werner Makowski, banker (b. 1929)

A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. -Mildred Witte Stouven

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you - Susan Sontag :D

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. -Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson, art historian (1865-1959)

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. -T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

Gopi's Collection

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired of waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet, don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with triumph and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken,
Twisted by knaves to make traps for fools,
Or watch the things you gave life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of your winnings,
And risk it in one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve sinew,
To serve you long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on';

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
If you can walk with kings and not lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds worth of distance run - 
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - what is more - you'll be a man my son!

- Rudyard Kipling


All that matters is Love and Work.
- Sigmund Freud

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerour men, for they act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
- T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926)

Your energy, you passion, your ability to lose yourself in the entirety and nitty-gritty of your venture to the exclusion of everything else is more important than capital. Thinking is the capital; enterprise is the way; hard work is the solution.
- APJ Abdul Kalam

You see things; and you say, 'Why?', but I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'
- George Bernard Shaw

'If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants'.
- Ogilvy  on Advertising

'In all healthy affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.'
- Bertrand Russell

Most of us don't get what we deserve because we do not ask for it.
- GRG

But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best laid plans of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy.
- Robert Burns poem 'To a Mouse'

Indecision is in itself grief.
- W. Shakesphere

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at flood, leads to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in the shallows and in miseries.
On a such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
- W. Shakesphere (Brutus in Julius Caesar)

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

If I am unable to make the Gods above relent, I shall move hell.
- Virgil

You can never plan the future by the past.
- Edmund Burke

I shall tell this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken'

It is not that I am a genius; I am infinitely more curious and I stay with the problem longer.
- Albert Einstein

Lead kindly light...
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step is enough for me.
- Church Hymn - Lead Kindly Light

If a man does not know to which port he is steering no wind is favorable to him.
- Seneca

Fortune favors the brave.
- Virgil

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson in Ulysses

...

"Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come Great Work."
- Rabindranath Tagore
(quote pasted on the spine of a folder at CPR library)



Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)


Everyday people die and the rest live as if they are immortal. That, is the greatest wonder - Yudhisthir, Yaksha Prashna, Madhya Parva, The Mahabhararta

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help.
- Thich Naht Hanh


What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)


When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)


To a mind that is still, the whole world surrenders.
- Lao Tsu