[Arabesque]

I cannot help but wonder, however, if we do not invent our own destiny, design our own fate, to suit our circumstances. How much of love is a trick of the mind, a mere feat of verbal acrobatics, to accommodate persons who just happen to cross our path and who suit our needs at one particular moment in time?

-- Anita Shreve

[Rain]

Are ye not well content, O Helpers, that the people take with them their sheep and their camels, and that ye take with you the Messenger of God unto your homes? If all men but the Helpers went one way, and the Helpers another, I would go the way of the Helpers.

Muhammad, his life based on the earliest sources, by Martin Lings. So beautiful.

[flutterz]

here's my contribution:

"Most people are, academically at least, barbarians." Morris smiled when she looked at him. "Easy to say 'Off with their heads' when you don't have to stand in the blood and have that head roll between your feet. A little of it splatters on them, they start calling for a cop."

"I don't know, Morris, sometimes it splatters on enough of them, and they get a good taste, they turn into a mob."

Purity in Death by Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb

[Arabesque]

She was fortunate, she had been brought up to be proud of her race and social status. But what of those into whom a sense of inferiority had been instilled for generation after generation - those who had become convinced that the colour of their skin, their religious beliefs, and their different way of life rendered them subhuman?

Regards from a Dead Princess, by Kenize Mourad (biography).

[Sharmaynia]

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

One of my favorite quotes ever, from "Self Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[Blue_Phoenix]

You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

From East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.

[AmroodWaala]

Originally Posted by flutterz

here's my contribution:

"Most people are, academically at least, barbarians." Morris smiled when she looked at him. "Easy to say 'Off with their heads' when you don't have to stand in the blood and have that head roll between your feet. A little of it splatters on them, they start calling for a cop."

"I don't know, Morris, sometimes it splatters on enough of them, and they get a good taste, they turn into a mob."

Purity in Death by Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb

nice

.......

[MossadConspiracy]

To be Unclean
That is the mark of the Mutant
To be Impure
That is the mark of the Mutant
To be Abhorred
That is the mark of the Mutant
To be Reviled
That is the mark of the Mutant
To be Hunted
That is the mark of the Mutant
To be Purged
That is the fate of the Mutant
To be Cleansed
For that is the fate of all Mutants

~Extract from a Training Chant in the First Book of Indoctrinations

[Haramoobobi]

“‘In the woods, we return to reason and faith,’ and become ‘part and parcel of God’”. --Emerson

"No knowledge considers or prescribes for the advantage of the stronger, but for that of the weaker, which it rules"
--Plato (republic)

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. "


"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. "
--Harper Lee, (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined."

"Men's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify..."
--God of small things

:The wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. . . The fear and anger of the majority [turned] toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequality - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention away from the huge theft of natural resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. "
-- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the U.S.

[Bluestar]

During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem 'Ode to a small lump of green putty I Found in My Armpit One Summer Morning', four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging...

The Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Those who wished to cultivate their persons first rectified their minds. Those who wished to rectify their minds first made their thoughts sincere. Those who wished to make their thoughts sincere first perfected their knowledge. The perfection of knowledge consists in understanding things.

Chu Hsi, founder or theologian of Neo-Confucianism

We live and yet whilst we speak, perhaps we die. Is this the land of the living or a region of the dead?

Isaac Ambrose

(The last two quotes i found whilst digging around some old study books)

[Pushpa]

Good thread Bluestar

"A long engagement is a partnership which one party is free to keep or to break, but which involves all the capital of the other." ~William Makepace Thackeray~ Vanity Fair

"It IS the pretty face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues. A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dulness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise." ~William Makepace Thackeray~ Vanity Fair

"Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for everyone; it keeps us from ennui and mischief, is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion." ~Louisa M. Alcott~ Little Women

More later.
.

[Bluestar]

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

[AmroodWaala]

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on

......Yeats

[sally]

"Do not believe that man grows. No: he is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road."

Ghasan Kanafani (author of Men in the Sun)




"Each man kills the things he loves"

"There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by ONE hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, ones dreams would have no meaning."


/The Alchemist

[Blue_Phoenix]

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."
The Magician's Nephew, by CS Lewis