Gathered Quotations (2012-2013)

 "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

--E. (Elwin) B. (Brooks) White, editor and author,

cited in The Writer's Almanac for July 11, 2013

“Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness.”

--David Hume, philosopher,

cited in The  Writer’s Almanac for April 26,2013

“Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

--Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac for January 15, 2012

“Always waving the big foam number one finger; we're not number one in most things. We're number one in military. We're number one in money. We're number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We're not number one in literacy, money spent on education. We're not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We're tenth. That's like Sweden coming in tenth in Swedish meatballs.”

--Comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac for January 20, 2012

“Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

--William Butler Yeats, poet,

cited in the signature line of an educator-colleague’s e-mail;

also attributed to several early Greek and later thinkers.

“Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.”

--A. E.  Housman, poet and classical scholar,

cited in Housman biography online at The Poetry Foundation.

“There's no possible way that you could write down in a document, sitting in your office or your library or with consultants, what the real world looks like.  The real world is chaos.”

--Steve Blank, author and professor,

speaking to the National Governors Association, July 2012.

“If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.”

--Ed Sullivan, television host and entertainment writer,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac for September 29, 2012.

“Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.”

--Elie Wiesel, writer, journalist, Holocaust survivor;

cited in The Writer’s Almanac, September 30, 2012

“Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.”

--Alice Childress, playwright and novelist;

cited in The Writer’s Almanac, October 12, 2012

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

--G. K. Chesterton, writer and Christian apologist,

from an early notebook circa 1890s;

numerous citations, including Schmidt, Gary, and Elizabeth Stickney.

Acceptable Words: Prayers for the Writer.

(Eerdmans, 2012)

“Synonymization is your friend.”

--Daniel Russell, Google research scientist,

lecturing on searching and research

 at the U. of California San Francisco (2008)

“I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer.”

--Denise Levertov, poet,

cited in The  Writer’s Almanac, October 24, 2012

“Events may progress in time, but time itself does not progress—it just passes.”

--Paul Brians, author,

Common Errors in English Usage—Second Edition

(William, James & Co.) 2009

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

--Sylvia Plath, poet,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac, October 27, 2012

“Quaerite Prime Regnum Dei”

--“Seek first the Kingdom of God”;

Motto of the Canadian Province of Newfoundland and Labrador

“. . . for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

--The New Testament,
II Timothy 1:7 (New Revised Standard Version)

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. [...] Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. Books are proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

--Carl Sagan, astronomer,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac, November 9, 2012.

“God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.”

Martin Luther, theologian,

cited in The Writer’s Almanac, November 10, 2012

“There is no focus without  fuzzy edges.”

--Paul W. Pruyser, psychologist,

in A Dynamic Psychology of Religion (Harper & Row, 1968)

“If teachers were to take an enthusiastic interest in what language is about, each teacher would have fairly serious problems to resolve. For instance, you can’t identify bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we are not dealing here, for the most part, with a technical problem.”

--Neil Postman, culture and media critic,

Speaking to the National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE],

November 28, 1969, Washington, DC

--cited and preserved in his blog

“Critical Thinking Snippets”  by Australian consultant Tim van Gelder

“What we hear by accident often has more credibility than what is said to us directly.”

--Ann Beattie, novelist and short story writer,

--cited on the travel website Matadornetwork

“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

--Tony Campolo, sociologist and evangelist,

--cited in a profile, “The Positive Prophet,” in Christianity Today, January 2003

“We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love.”

--Mother Teresa, nun of Calcutta,

--cited by blogger James C. Schaap, “Stuff in the Basement,” April 16, 2013