Melanee Evans > Melanee's Quotes

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“I know you're tired but come, this is the way.”
― Jalalu'l-din Rumi

“What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“The life of study is austere and imposes grave obligations. It pays, it pays richly; but it exacts an initial outlay that few are capable of. The athletes of the mind, like those of the playing field, must be prepared for privations, long training, a sometimes superhuman tenacity. We must give ourselves from the heart, if truth is to give itself to us. ‪#‎Truth‬ serves only its slaves.”
― A. G. Sertillanges

“Whoever expresses truth expresses God, the Word, and utters therefore a word of God.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“How puerile it would be, and what a dangerous heresy from the religious point of view, to believe that passion in its proper place is offensive to God! We are not Manicheans, that we should incline to believe that the flesh is under a curse, and that all matter springs from the Principle of Evil. Rather do we say that matter and the flesh come from God”
― Antonin Sertillanges

“Do you want to have a humble share in perpetuating wisdom among men, in gathering up the inheritance of the ages, in formulating the rules of the mind for the present time, in discovering facts and causes, in turning men's wandering eyes towards first causes and their hearts towards supreme ends, in reviving if necessary some dying flame, in organizing the propaganda of truth and goodness? That is the lot reserved for you. It is surely worth a little extra sacrifice; it is worth steadily pursuing with jealous passion.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Look in the heart and write...The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life!”
― Antonin Sertillanges

“When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”
― Thomas Sowell

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?”
― Thomas Sowell, Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays

“No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”
― Thomas Sowell

“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.”
― Thomas Sowell

“I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.
We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
― Thomas Sowell

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
― Pema Chodron

“We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.”
― Pema Chodron

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society.

It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others....Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”
― Pema Chodron

“We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.”
― Pema Chodron

“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion