Dan > Dan's Quotes

“Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.”
― Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla

“Contentment makes poor men rich,
Discontent makes rich men poor.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“In order to live a creative life, we must give up the fear of being
wrong.”
― Satyen Raja

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“The American Crisis

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
― Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers

“The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
― Emma Lazarus

“Thinking

Thinking is passing from the false to the true
and seeing the Absolute Whole in the part.
When the idea enters the mind,
it is a reminiscence of a former state,
and passes on to interpretation.

. . . He who sees by illumination
discerns God first in everything.
But he who sees by logic only,
and seeks to prove the necessary,
is bewildered and sometimes travels
backward in a circle, or is imprisoned
in a chain of proofs.
Fool! He seeks the dazzling sun
by the dim light of a candle in the desert.”
― Sa'd Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari

“To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“ Light and praise,
Love and atonement, harmony and peace.
Touch me, assail me, break and make my heart.”
― Edwin Muir

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”
― Thomas Merton

“However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva