Quotes on humor and truth

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To be curious about that which is not one’s concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.
Plato

Everyone hears only what he understands.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The bullies always win. Fact!

just me

"Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind... And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again... Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory. Forgiving sets you free."
Lewis Smedes

“Men forget but never forgive. Women forgive but never forget.”

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
George Washington

“The government being the people's business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Publicity is therefore as essential to honest administration as freedom of speech is to representative government. "Equal rights to all and special privileges to none" is the maxim which should control in all departments of government.”
William Jennings Bryan

“The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.”
William Orville Douglas

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
Eleanor Holmes Norton

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“Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.”
(unknown)

“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
Mark Twain

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."
Henri Bergson

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. ~Edward R. Murrow

Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day. ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that's worth mentioning? ~Coleman Cox

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known. ~Samuel Johnson

When you throw dirt, you lose ground. ~Texan Proverb

"For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice"
John Burroughs

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
Oscar Wilde

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely. ~Roald Dahl

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left. ~Hubert Humphrey

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts. ~Samuel Johnson

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.”
Tao Te Ching quote

skywriter wrote:

(and for Jana...)
"One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter."
~ Henry David Thoreau

Why, thank you, Sky!!!

Michael Bridge
When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open, and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.

“You think that good is hating what is bad. What is bad is the hating mind itself.”
—Bon Kai (Buddhist monk)

“He drew a circle to keep me out,
A thing of scorn, and a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.”
—Edwin Markham

Leo Buscaglia
Relish love in your old age! Aged love is like aged wine; it becomes more satisfying, more refreshing, more valuable, more appreciated and more intoxicating!

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves. ~Author Unknown

The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. ~Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963

In the last analysis we must be judged by what we do and not by what we believe. We are as we behave - with a very small margin of credit for our unmanifested vision of how we might behave if we could take the trouble. ~Geoffrey L. Rudd, The British Vegetarian, September/October 1962

We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they? ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Isak Dinesen
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.