Monday, August 31, 2009

Meandering on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of William Saroyan (August 31, 1908 - May 18, 1981) was an American-Armenian dramatist and author.

The USPS honored William Saroyan with a stamp in 1991. This stamp was issued jointly with Russia, (at that time, the Soviet Union) on the same day, May 22, 1991.

"Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." - William Saroyan

"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play." - William Saroyan

"If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language." - William Saroyan

"The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business." - William Saroyan

"I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it." - William Saroyan

"The role of art is to make a world which can be tolerated." - William Saroyan

"Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends." - William Saroyan

Saroyan stamps image source (1)

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797 – February 1, 1851), novelist. She is best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye..." - Mary Shelley

"There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour — but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore." - Mary Shelley

"I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling." - Mary Shelley

"Live, and be happy, and make others so." - Mary Shelley

Shelley image source (1)

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Meandering to and fro . . .

Today is the birthday of Maurice Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949), playwright, poet and essayist. He is best known for L'Oiseau Bleu (The Blue Bird) which, like most of his work, explores the meaning of life and death.

Maurice Maeterlinck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.

"Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence." - Maurice Maeterlinck

"An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it." - Maurice Maeterlinck

"Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness." - Maurice Maeterlinck

"Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?" - Maurice Maeterlinck

"We possess only the happiness we are able to understand." - Maurice Maeterlinck

Maeterlinck image source (1)

Friday, August 28, 2009

Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (August 28, 1749 – March 22, 1832), poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher. His best known work, Faust, oft referred to as his magnum opus, took much of his literary life, a period of 57 years to complete. He completed Faust when he was 81 years old.

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


"A person hears only what they understand." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe stamps image source (1)

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), jazz tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. He is best known as the President of Jazz or simply The Prez and for his incredible solos.

“The trouble with most musicians today is that they are copycats. Of course you have to start out playing like someone else. You have a model, or a teacher, and you learn all that he can show you. But then you start playing for yourself. Show them that you're an individual. And I can count those who are doing that today on the fingers of one hand.” - Lester Young

“Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original.” - Lester Young

Young image source (1)

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of John Buchan (August 26, 1875 - February 11, 1940), novelist, poet, and politician. He is best remembered for his 27th book, the thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there." - John Buchan

"The world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other." - John Buchan

"The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them." - John Buchan

"We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves." - John Buchan

"I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support." - John Buchan

Buchan image source (1)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990), conductor, composer, music lecturer, pianist and author. He is best remembered as the longtime music director of the New York Philharmonic and writing the music for West Side Story.

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein

"The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world." - Leonard Bernstein

"Any great work of art ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air." - Leonard Bernstein

"In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing." - Leonard Bernstein

"Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." - Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein image source (1)

Monday, August 24, 2009

Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), writer, poet and librarian. Best known as Jorges Luis Borges, his tales of fantasy and dreamworlds have universal themes that often make use of a circular labyrinth as a metaphor of life and/or as a riddle of time.

"Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song." - Jorges Luis Borges

"All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." - Jorges Luis Borges

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." - Jorges Luis Borges

"There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects." - Jorges Luis Borges

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorges Luis Borges

Borges image source (1)

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 - March 5, 1950), biographer, dramatist, lawyer and poet. He is best-known as the author of Spoon River Anthology (1915).

"How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?" - Edgar Lee Masters

"To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid." - Edgar Lee Masters

"Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it." - Edgar Lee Masters

"The earth keeps some vibration going, There in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, Why, fiddle you must, for all your life." - Edgar Lee Masters

Masters stamp image source (1)

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of Raymond Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920), writer. He is best known as Ray Bradbury, author of the novel Fahrenheit 451 and the 1950 science fiction short story collection The Martian Chronicles.

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts." - Ray Bradbury

"There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves." - Ray Bradbury

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." - Ray Bradbury

"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." - Ray Bradbury

Bradbury image source (1)

Friday, August 21, 2009

Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of William "Count" Basie (August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984), jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer.

Count Basie is considered one of the most important jazz bandleaders of his time and led his popular Count Basie Orchestra for almost 50 years.

"It's the way you play that makes it . . . Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And whatever you get, that's you, so that's your story." - Count Basie

"Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues." - Count Basie

"I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here."- Count Basie


"All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel... and that`s what I`ve been doing all my life." - Count Basie

Basie stamp source (1)

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Meandering in time . . .

Today is the birthday of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), author. He is best known as H. P. Lovecraft, a creator of horror, fantasy, science fiction stories and the 20th century master of weird fiction.

He is credited with the development of the philosophy of Cosmicism - the idea that life is really incomprehensible to man and that the universe is fundamentally alien.

"But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean." - H. P. Lovecraft

"I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams. " - H. P. Lovecraft

"Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal..." - H. P. Lovecraft

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown..." - H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft image source (1)

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971), poet and humorist.

"There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, And that is to have either a clear conscience, or none at all." - Ogden Nash

"Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny - Did you ever try buying then without money?" - Ogden Nash

"One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence." - Ogden Nash

"The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control." - Ogden Nash

"You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely." - Ogden Nash


"Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long." - Ogden Nash

"Candy Is dandy, but liquor Is quicker." - Ogden Nash

Nash image source (1)
Nash stamp image source (1)

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of Charles Robert Redford Jr. (born August 18, 1936/7), better known as Robert Redford, film director, actor, producer, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival.

"Generally speaking, I went through that. I came to a place where I realised what true value was. It wasn't money. Money is a means to achieving an end, but it's not the end." - Robert Redford

"It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter." - Robert Redford

"All my life I`ve been dogged by guilt because I feel there is this difference between the way I look and the way I feel inside." - Robert Redford

"Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on." - Robert Redford

"The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story." - Robert Redford

"Filmgoers are starved for new ideas, voices and visions." - Robert Redford

Redford image source (1)

Monday, August 17, 2009

Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Llewellyn George (August 17, 1876 - July 11, 1954), astrologer and publisher. He was the founder of Llewellyn Publications.

Llewellyn George is best known for his works, Moon Sign Book and Gardening Guide and New A to Z Horoscope Maker and Interpreter: A Comprehensive Self-Study Course. The annual Moon Sign Book and Gardening Guide, first published in 1906, is still relied on by farmers, homemakers and astrologers, for its invaluable advice on timing.

"Astrology is the ancient art and science of foretelling details of the future, the past, the present, the nature of people and events by understanding the influence of planetary bodies." - Llewellyn George

"Astrology is the connecting link between the Human and the Divine. It is a spiritual science couched in finite terms for the understanding of mortals struggling toward the light of a better day." - Llewellyn George

George image source (1)

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980), jazz pianists. He is best known as Bill Evans, one of the most influential jazz pianists of the 20th century.

"Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling." - Bill Evans

"My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise...a part of yourself you never knew existed." - Bill Evans


"When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed." - Bill Evans

Evans image source (1)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of Oscar Emmanuel Peterson (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007), jazz pianist and composer.

"You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz." - Oscar Peterson

"I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea." - Oscar Peterson

"If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you." - Oscar Peterson


"I play as I feel." - Oscar Peterson


Trivia bit: Oscar Peterson had arthritis since his youth, and in later years could hardly button his shirt.

Peterson stamp image source (1)

Friday, August 14, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of John Galsworthy (August 14, 1867 – January 31, 1933), novelist and playwright. He best known for his series, The Forsyte Saga.

John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

"The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet." - John Galsworthy

"Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem." - John Galsworthy

"If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one." - John Galsworthy

"One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth what one becomes." - John Galsworthy

Galsworthy image source (1)

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of William (Bill) Bernbach (August 13, 1911 - October 2, 1982), one of the three founders of Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) advertising agency. He was a "legendary figure" in the history of American advertising.

Familiar and notable campaigns of Bill Bernbach's are "Think Small" (Volkswagen Beetle), "We Try Harder" (Avis Car Rental), "Mikey" (Life Cereal), "You Don't Have to be Jewish to Love Levy's" (Levy's Rye Bread) and "It's so simple" (Polaroid).

"All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level." - Bill Bernbach

"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what your saying, and they can't know what you've saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting until you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly." - Bill Bernbach

"Good advertising builds sales. Great advertising builds factories."- Bill Bernbach

"The most powerful element in advertising is the truth." - Bill Bernbach

Bernbach image source (1)

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Meandering in theory . . .

Today is the birthday of Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (August 12, 1887 – January 4, 1961), physicist. He was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics. He is best known for his proposal of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

"The isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, Who are we?" - Erwin Schrödinger

"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary..." - Erwin Schrödinger

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind..." - Erwin Schrödinger


"We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators." - Erwin Schrödinger

"Inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all." - Erwin Schrödinger

"The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real." - Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger stamp images source (1)

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Meandering in thought . . .

Today is the birthday of José Silva (August 11, 1914 - February 7, 1999), parapsychologist and author. He is best known for developing the self help program known as the Silva Method.

"There is no such thing as a problem without a solution, only problems for which we do not yet have enough information to know what the solution is. When you have enough information, it is easy to solve a problem." - José Silva

"How much help you get, from higher intelligence, depends on how big your plans are. The bigger your plans are - meaning... how many people will benefit - the more help you will qualify for." - José Silva

"The greatest discovery you'll ever make, is the potential of your own mind." - José Silva

"We do not want to gain at someone else's loss; we want to gain while helping the other person to also gain." - José Silva


"When we forget to use visualization and imagination, it is like not using our minds." - José Silva

"To qualify as humans we must take part in humanitarian activities." - José Silva

Silva image source (1)

Monday, August 10, 2009

Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of Alfred Döblin (August 10, 1878 – June 26, 1957), novelist and physician. He is oft referred to as the most talented narrative writer of the German Expressionist movement. Alfred Döblin’s best-known and most Expressionistic novel is Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).

"But the main things about a man are his eyes and his feet. He should be able to see the world and go after it." - Alfred Döblin

"Much unhappiness comes from walking alone. When there are several, it's somewhat different." - Alfred Döblin


Döblin image source (1)
Döblin stamp image source (
1)

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of John Dryden (August 9, 1631 – May 12, 1700), poet and playwright. His work dominated the literary circles of Restoration England to such an extent that the period came to be known as the Age of Dryden.

"Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv'd today." - John Dryden

"The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves." - John Dryden

"Death in itself is nothing; but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where." - John Dryden

"They think too little who talk too much." - John Dryden

"Beware the fury of a patient man." - John Dryden

"Words are but pictures of our thoughts." - John Dryden

Dryden image source (1)

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Meandering in theory . . .

Today is the birthday of Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (August 8, 1902 – October 20, 1984), theoretical physicist and a founder of the field of quantum physics. Paul Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".

"There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world." - Paul Dirac

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world." - Paul Dirac

"Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star." - Paul Dirac

"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world." - Paul Dirac

Dirac image source (1)

Friday, August 7, 2009

Meandering on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of Gary Edward Keillor (born August 7, 1942), novelist, humorist, comedian, and public radio personality. He is best known as Garrison Keillor, the host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion.

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose." - Garrison Keillor

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." - Garrison Keillor

"A book is a gift you can open again and again." - Garrison Keillor

"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it." - Garrison Keillor



Keillor image source (1)

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of Alfred Tennyson (August 6, 1809 – October 6, 1892), poet. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and is considered one of the most popular poets in the English language.

"I hold it true, whatever befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." - Alfred Tennyson

"If thou shouldst never see my face again, pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." - Alfred Tennyson

"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?" - Alfred Tennyson

"I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair." - Alfred Tennyson"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend." - Alfred Tennyson

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." - Alfred Tennyson

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world." - Alfred Tennyson

"Trust me not at all, or all in all." - Alfred Tennyson

"I am a part of all that I have seen." - Alfred Tennyson

Trivia bit: He is the second most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare.

Tennyson image source (1)
Tennyson stamp image source (1)

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934), academic, author and farmer.

"Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is." - Wendell Berry

"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us." - Wendell Berry

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry


"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival." - Wendell Berry

"We cannot comprehend what comprehends us." - Wendell Berry

Berry image source (1)

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Meandering forever . . .

Today is the birthday Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822), poet, oft referred to as one of the finest lyric poets in the English language.

"When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, - but it returneth." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Fear not for the future, weep not for the past." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Trivia bit: Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death.
  • "As much as he was near and on the water Shelley never learned to swim or navigate. He also forecasted many times his death by drowning. During the stormy return voyage to Lerici, his small schooner the Ariel sank and Shelley drowned with Edward Williams on July 8, 1822. The fisheaten bodies were washed ashore at Viareggio, where, in the presence of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, they were burned on the beach - his heart was given to his wife, who carried it with her in a silken shroud everywhere she went for the rest of her life. Shelley's ashes was later buried in Rome. There is a rumor that an old Italian seaman confessed on his deathbed that he had been a crewmember on a boat that collided intentionally with Shelley's ship in order to steal money hidden on board." direct quote source (1)
Shelley image source (1)

Monday, August 3, 2009

Meandering in time . . .

Today is the birthday of Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 - April 27, 1988), science fiction writer. He was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SWFA) in 1977.

"He had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same... there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment." - Clifford D. Simak

"He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand." - Clifford D. Simak

"Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists..." - Clifford D. Simak

"Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning." - Clifford D. Simak

"If we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe..." - Clifford D. Simak

Simak image source (1)

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987), writer and civil rights activist.

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks." - James Baldwin

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others." - James Baldwin

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." - James Baldwin


"I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative." - James Baldwin

"Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours." - James Baldwin

Baldwin image source (1)
Baldwin stamp image (
1)

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Meandering to and fro . . .

Today is the birthday of Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891), novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. He is best-known for his novels of the sea and his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851).

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke." - Herman Melville

"Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." - Herman Melville

"There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." - Herman Melville

"There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath." - Herman Melville

"To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living." - Herman Melville

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." - Herman Melville

"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity." - Herman Melville

"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?" - Herman Melville

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville

"To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another." - Herman Melville

Melville image source (1)
Melville stamp image source (
1)