#482 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday October 14)
Good morning,
Today, an installment of inspirational quotations, loosely on a theme…
LIFE
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is another day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” –Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs”. –Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
LIBERTY
“Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice…” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. …And when this happens…let it ring from every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.” –David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Most people are on the world and not in it.” and “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” –John Muir
“The ability to be awed, excited, and inspired by ideas is a practice that radically opens the mind. Excited about learning, ecstatic about thoughts and ideas, as teachers and students we have the opportunity to use knowledge in ways that positively transform the world we live in.”—bell hooks, in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
Have a great and meaningful day and weekend,
Glenn
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