Who is more foolish - the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?

-- Maurice Freehill

Holy men tell us life is a mystery.
They embrace that concept happily.
But some mysteries bite and bark
And come to get you in the dark.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

A rain of shadows, a storm, a squall!
Daylight retreats, night swallows all.
If good is bright, if evil is gloom,
High evil walls the world entombs.
Now comes the end, the drear, Darkfall.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Darkness devours every shining day.
Darkness demands and always has its way.
Darkness listens, watches, waits.
Darkness claims the day and celebrates.
Sometimes in silence darkness comes.
Sometimes with a gleeful banging of drums.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Is there some meaning to this life?
What purpose lies behind the strife?
Whence do we come, where are we bound?
These cold questions echo and resound
Through each day, each lonely night.
We long to find the splendid light
That will cast a revelatory beam
Upon the meaning of the human dream.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Courage, love, friendship,
Compassion and empathy
Lift us above the simple beasts
And define humanity.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Numberless paths of night
Wind away from twilight.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Something moves within the night
That is not good and is not right.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

The whisper of the dusk
Is night shedding its husk.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, by Dean Koontz

Evil is no faceless stranger,
Living in a distant neighborhood.
Evil has a wholesome, hometown face,
With merry eyes and an open smile.
Evil walks among us, wearing a mask
Which looks like all our faces.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

-- Lao Tzu

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

-- Sir Thomas Browne

Goodness speaks in a whisper. Evil shouts.

-- a Tibetan proverb

Goodness shouts. Evil whispers.

-- a Balinese proverb

A person may smile and smile and still be a villain.

-- Noelle Spafford

Choices and actions indicate character.

-- Edgar V. Roberts

Smart is believing half of what you know. Brilliant is knowing which half to believe.

-- Deidre Peterson

Life isn't fair -- it's just more fair than death.

-- The man in black, The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

The world's an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress!

-- Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

You will never lose betting on human stupidity.

-- John Hanscom

The key to success is ignorance - it's much easier to do something when you don't know it's impossible.

-- Woody

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

-- James Thurber

I think, therefore, I am a mustache.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre (kind of)

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.

-- Voltaire

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.

-- Thomas Alva Edison

It is not best that we think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

-- Mark Twain

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.

-- Eugene Ionesco

The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things.

-- Buddha

If freedom is a state of mind then this is one big mental block.

-- graffitti on the Berlin wall

Per mi si va ne la citta dolente,
Per mi si va ne l'etterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
Fecimi la divina podestate,
La somma sapienza e 'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
Se non etterne, e is etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

-- Inscription above the gates of hell, Inferno, by Dante Alligheiri
Translation:
Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here

The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.

-- Captain Kirk, "Shore Leave"

When you lose your power to laugh, you lose your power to think straight.

-- Robert E. Lee

"Do you believe in ghosts?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.... They contain no matter, and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.... Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in peoples minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe."

-- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert R. Pirsig

The world has no existence whatsoever outside of human imagination.

-- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert R. Pirsig

While I was at the hotel today an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and the white people.... I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races; that I am not, nor even have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.... I as much as any man am in favor of having the supenior position assigned to the white race.

-- Abraham Lincoln, 1858

What if this were a rhetorical question?

-- Woody

It is not enough to have a good mind - the main thing is to use it well.

-- Anonymous

If all the world's a stage, then when the last act is finished and mankind departs, there will be no applause.

-- Jason Alexander

It's all the same in the end, matter and motion, simple or complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, amen.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

The world is what it is and always was. That's our hope, our chance. Yet even in times of catastrophe we people it with tricks.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

Except in the life of a hero, the whole world is meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

Grendel's Law: For every action of the human heart, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

-- Grendel, John Gardener

Allow people their dreams, and they shall allow you yours.

-- Royce Williams

I used to think there were two categories - crazy and not crazy. Now I know it's not that complicated.

-- "Handy Dandy"

People read us by our cover. Our face reflects what we are, and what we feel - and what we deny we are feeling. Smiles dull when we are saddened. Eyes sparkle when life is good. The face when it laughs is a magnet for love. Ultimate beauty, we suspect, is the consequence of inner serenity.

-- Lears

Time is a corridor that runs through my life,
Out of each door comes a day,
And when that door closes and I've said goodnight,
Another door opens again.
Down in the corridor there will be a time
When I shall run out of doors.

-- Squeeze, "In Today's Room"

We did everything the way grownups would. Why didn't it work?

-- Piggy, Lord of the Flies, William Golding

The best laid plot can injure its maker, and often a man's perfidy will rebound on himself.

-- Jean de la Fontaine

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

-- Emile Zola

Sometimes I think that the surest sign of intelligent life in this universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

-- "Calvin & Hobbes"

Every eye sees its own special vision;
Eveny ear hears a most different song.
In each man's troubled heart, an incision
Would reveal a unique, shameful wrong.
Stranger fiends hide here in human guise
Than reside in the valleys of Hell.
But goodness, kindness and love arise
In the heart of the poor beast, as well.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows

Superstition bnings bad luck.

-- Raymond Smullyan

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

-- Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco

Finally, there are few satisfactions greater than being your own man, living a thoughtful life where few hostages have been given to fortune, and achieving your own unique values. What, then, do many people, young and old, really want? They want more uncluttered space, physically and spiritually. They want a place where they can sit down without having someone tell them to move over. They want more people to practice what Rudyard Kipling called "the art of judicious letting alone."

-- from mom's Adult Learning and Development textbook

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications...are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye fon nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

-- Hiram Johnson

what's wholly
marvelous,
Darling,
is that you & i
are more than you & i
because
it's
we.

-- e. e. cummings

Some people drink fnom the fountain of knowledge - others just gargle.

-- Anonymous

Truth and information are not the same thing, and neither are reality and state of existance!

-- Mindplayers, Pat Cadigan

Some people walk in the rain - others just get wet.

-- anonymous

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to suck the marrow out of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-- Henry David Thoreau

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

-- Walt Whitman

Abel waxed fat and rich breeding sheep for the slaughter while Cain tilled. Cain made an offering to the lord. Abel followed suit with his quaking fat calves. Who'd have gruel rather than a T-bone? And soon Abel had vast herds and air-conditioned slaughterhouses, and meat storehouses and meat package plants, and there was a blight on Cain's crop. And that was called sin.... Cain stood and looked at the blight on his crop. And his spade was useless against it in his hand. And it came to pass that Abel was trespassing there where Cain would carry his spade, which is where land is to be tilled and not where sheep pasture. And Abel saw his elder brother and he was thin and with a starved look and held the spade to no purpose in his hand. And Abel approached his brother, saying: "Why don't you give up and come to work for me? I could use a good man in the slaughterhouse." And Cain slew him.

-- From a CD by "The Mark of Cain", a German alternative band

Life without inquiry is not worth living.

-- Socrates

You ever read Eckhart? Eckhart saw it all too. You know what he said? He said the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life. Your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So...if you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But, if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all.

-- Louis, in "Jacob's Ladder"

If life is meaningless, then why the hell bring up the subject?

-- Lily Tomlin, in "The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe"

I choose my friends for their looks, and my enemies for their intelligence. You're too foxy to be my friend.

-- Alfredo, in "Cinema Paradiso"

I don't want to hear you talk anymore - I want to hear talk about you.

-- Alfredo, in "Cinema Paradiso"

Nur tote Fische schwimmen mit dem Strom.
(Only dead fish swim with the stream.)

-- Katja Berger

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Allright then," said the savage defiantly. "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

-- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

-- ad from the National Coalition for the Homeless

"...how about you, Harold? What flower would you like to be?"
Harold rubbed his nose. "I don't know," he said. "I'm just an ordinary person." He gestured out at a field of daisies that ran all the way to the hills. "Maybe one of those."
"Why do you say that?" asked Maude, a little perturbed.
"I guess," he answered softly, "because they are all the same."
"Oh, but they're not! Look here." She guided him over to a clump of daisies.
"See? Some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have petals missing - all kinds of observeable differences, and we haven't even touched the biochemical. You see, Harold, they're like the Japanese. At first you think they all look alike, but after you get to know them, you see there is not a repeat in the bunch. It's just like this daisy. Each person is different, never existed before, and never to exist again." She picked it. "An individual."
She smiled, and they both stood up.
"Well," said Harold moodily, "we may be individuals, all right. But," he added, glancing out at the field, "we have to grow up together."
Maude looked at Harold. "That's very true," she murmured. "Still, I believe that much of the world's sorrow comes from people who know they are this" - she held the daisy in her hand - "yet let themselves be treated as that."
She blinked back the tears that were forming in her eyes and looked out over the thousands and thousands of daisies waving gently in the afternoon sun.

-- Harold and Maude, Colin Higgins

"Most people aren't like you. They're locked up in themselves. They live in their castles - all alone. They're like me."
"Well, everyone lives in his own castle," said Maude. "But that's no reason not to lower the drawbridge and go out on visits."

-- Harold and Maude, Colin Higgins

"I heard a story once in the Orient about two architects who went to see the Buddha. They had run out of money on their projects and hoped the Buddha could do something about it. 'Well, I'll do what I can,' said the Buddha, and he went off to see their work. The first architect was building a bridge, and the Buddha was very impressed. 'That's a very good bridge,' he said, and began to pray. Suddenly a great white bull appeared, carrying on its back enough gold to finish construction. 'Take it,' said the Buddha, 'and build even more bridges.' And so the first architect went away very happy. The second architect was building a wall, and when the Buddha saw it he was equally impressed. 'That's a very good wall,' he said solemnly, and began to pray. Suddenly the sacred bull appeared, walked over to the second architect, and sat on him."
"...Well," said Maude..., "It's the truth. The world needs no more walls. What we've all got to do is get out and build more bridges!"

-- Harold and Maude, Colin Higgins

Harold took the [hookah] hose and inhaled. He smiled. "I'm sure picking up on vices," he said.
"Vice? Virtue? It's best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. As Confucius says, 'Don't simply be good. Make good things happen.'"

-- Harold and Maude, Colin Higgins

"If God is so great, so all-powerful, and so kind, then why is there all this suffering in the world? Why so much death, so much pain?"
"Well, think about it. All power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely."

-- The daughter of God, then Satan, in Only Begotten Daughter, by James Morrow

Life without meaning cannot be borne.
We find a mission to which we're sworn
- or answer the call of Death's dark horn.
Without a gleaning of purpose in life,
we have no vision, we live in strife,
- or let blood fall on a suicide knife.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, Dean Koontz

Nowhere can a secret keep
always secret, dark and deep,
half so well as in the past,
buried deep to last, to last.
Keep it in your own dark heart,
otherwise the rumors start.
After many years have buried
secrets over which you worried
no confidant can then betray
all the words you didn't say.
Only you can then exhume
secrets safe within the tomb
of memory, of memory,
within the tomb of memory.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, Dean Koontz

In the real world,
as in dreams,
nothing is quite
what it seems.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, Dean Koontz

Vibrations in a wire.
Ice crystals
in a beating heart.
Cold fire.
A mind's frigidity:
frozen steel,
dark rage, morbidity.
Cold fire.
Defense against
a cruel life
death and strife:
Cold fire.

-- The Book of Counted Sorrows, Dean Koontz

A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds to religion.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end.

-- Heinrich Heine

...for every human being there is a diversity of existences...the single existence is itself an illusion...

-- Saul Bellow

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

-- Thomas Henry Huxley

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

-- Chang-tzu

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song.
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

-- William Butler Yeats

A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies.

-- Oscar Wilde

Hence, loathed Melancholy
Of Cerberus abd blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn,
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.

-- John Milton

From generation to generation it shall lie waste, none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl and the raven shall also dwell in it; and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness...
...and it shall be an habitation for dragons.

-- Isaiah Ben-Amoz

It is easy to go down into Hell;
night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide;
but to climb back up again, to retrace one's steps
to the upper air -- there's the rub, the task.

-- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)

Give me where to stand, and I shall move the world.

-- Archimedes

There are some people who read too much - the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drink on books as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

-- H. L. Mancken

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.

-- Carl Jung

I have thought long and hard about the course I am to follow. I ask only that you believe the sincerety of my thoughts. I wish to make my contribution, perhaps a modest one but in my view an important one, to our mutual cause. Henceforth I am your soldier, pledged to carry out everything which is entrusted to me. I will give all my strength, knowledge, and my life to this new obligation.

-- Oleg Penkovsky

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost minute by minute, day by boring day, in all the thousand, small uncaring ways.

-- Stephen Vincent Benet

Katz's Law: Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

-- Tripo

Mother is far to clever to understand anything she doesn't like.

-- Arnold Bennett

The greater an individual's power over others, the greater the evil that might possibly originate with him.

-- PROPAGANDA, from A Secret Word

Every human being is intended to have a character of his of his own; to be what no other is, and to do what no other can do.

-- William Channing

It is age and selfness that kill love. We grow more and more into our true selves every second that we are alive. If there is such a thing as fate it is this: the outer self seeking and awakening to the true self no matter the pain and terror - and there is always pain and terror - no matter how great the cost may be.

-- Mallory, Neverness, David Zindell

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