James Klagge > James's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“In the business world it's not what you know, it's who you know. In the academic world it's not who you know, it's whom you know.”
― James C. Klagge

“God made the empty set, man made the rest.”
― Duncan Muirhead

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Never oversimplify.”
― James C. Klagge

“The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
― M. Scott Peck

“To really belong to one another and to depend on one another–to really share a common destiny–is difficult for a community that wants to be diverse. It is also the community’s only hope of survival. Whether or not we will be honest with each other, whether or not we will let ourselves be truly known, determines everything.”
― N. Gordon Cosby, Seized By the Power of a Great Affection

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir

“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan: Complete, annotated new translation

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry