Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947), author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her work, One of Ours (1922).

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles!"
- Willa Cather

"When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless."
- Willa Cather

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
- Willa Cather

"Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement."
- Willa Cather

"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."
- Willa Cather

"It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of."
- Willa Cather

"That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
- Willa Cather

Cather image source (1)

Monday, December 6, 2010

Meandering on the path . . .

Today is the birthday of Violet Mary Firth (December 6, 1890 – January 8, 1946), occultist and author. She is better known by her pseudonym Dion Fortune, which was inspired by her family motto "Deo, non fortuna" (Latin for "by God, not fate").

"Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will."
- Dion Fortune

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect."
- Dion Fortune

"There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as masks. There are times when life puts off the mask and deep answers unto deep."
- Dion Fortune

"We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them."
- Dion Fortune

"Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand--an extended application of its powers."
- Dion Fortune

Fortune image source (1)

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968), journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is oft referred to as one of the founding mothers (with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson) of the American libertarian movement.

"Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand."
- Rose Wilder Lane

"Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted."
- Rose Wilder Lane

"As novices, we think we're entirely responsible for the way people treat us. I have long since learned that we are responsible only for the way we treat people."
- Rose Wilder Lane

"Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it."
- Rose Wilder Lane

"Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open."
- Rose Wilder Lane

Lane image source (1)

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881), essayist, historian and philosopher.

"A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder."
- Thomas Carlyle

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther."
- Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle image source (1)

Friday, December 3, 2010

Meandering in a dream . . .

Today is the birthday of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924), novelist and short-story writer. He is best known as Joseph Conrad.

"A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth."
- Joseph Conrad

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
- Joseph Conrad

"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone..."
- Joseph Conrad

"He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense."
- Joseph Conrad

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns."
- Joseph Conrad

"A man's most open actions have a secret side to them."
- Joseph Conrad

Conrad image source (1)

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Meandering in thought . . .

Today is the birthday of Sissela Bok (born 2 December 1934), philosopher and ethicist. Sissela Bok is best known for her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life (1978) and as the daughter of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, both Nobel Prize winners.

"Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived."
- Sissela Bok

"Confidentiality refers to the boundaries surrounding shared secrets and to the process of guarding these boundaries. While confidentiality protects much that is not in fact secret, personal secrets lie at its core. The innermost, the vulnerable, often the shameful: these aspects of self-disclosure help explain why one name for professional confidentiality has been "the professional secret." Such secrecy is sometimes mistakenly confused with privacy; yet it can concern many matters in no way private, but that someone wishes to keep from the knowledge of third parties."
- Sissela Bok

"While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive."
- Sissela Bok

"White lies are at the other end of the spectrum of deception from lies in a serious crisis. They are the most common and the most trivial forms that duplicity can take. The fact that they are so common provides their protective coloring. And their very triviality, when compared to more threatening lies, makes it seem unnecessary or even absurd to condemn them. Some consider all well-intentioned lies, however momentous, to be white; I shall adhere to the narrower usage: a white lie, in this sense, is a falsehood not meant to injure anyone, and of little moral import."
- Sissela Bok

“We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.”
- Sissela Bok

“Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.”
- Sissela Bok

Bok image source (1)

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Meandering here, meandering there, meandering all around . . .

Today is the birthday of Rex Todhunter Stout (December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975), mystery novelist and publisher. He is best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe.

"The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made."
- Rex Stout

"A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them."
- Rex Stout

"Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth."
- Rex Stout

"The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books."
- Rex Stout

“There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”
- Rex Stout

Stout image source (1)


Today is the birthday of Daniel Pennacchioni (born December 1st, 1944*), writer. He is best known by his pen name, Daniel Pennac and for his humorous, imaginative writing style.

"A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself."
- Daniel Pennac

"Since the dawn of education, the student considered as normal has been the student who puts up the least resistance to teaching, the one who doesn't call our knowledge into question or put our competency to the test, a student who already knows a lot, who is gifted with instant comprehension, who spares us searching for the access roads to his grey matter, a student with a natural urge to learn, who can stop being a kid in turmoil or a teenager with problems during our lessons, a student convinced from the cradle that he has to curb his appetites and emotions by exercising his reason if he doesn't want to live in a jungle filled with predators, a student confident that the intellectual life is a source of infinite pleasures that can be refined to the extreme when most other pleasures are doomed to monotonous repetition - in short, a student who has understood that knowledge is the only answer: the answer to the slavery in which ignorance wants to keep us, the sole consolation for our ontological loneliness."
- Daniel Pennac

"We human being build houses because we`re alive but we write books because we` re mortal. We live in groups because we`re sociable but we read because we know we`re alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one`s place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.”
- Daniel Pennac

"Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime."
- Daniel Pennac

* Question of actual date
Pennac image source (1)