Meandering in a dream . . .

Today is the birthday of John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821), poet.

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."
- John Keats

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."
- John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."
- John Keats

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."
- John Keats

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972), poet and critic.

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
- Ezra Pound

"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
- Ezra Pound

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."
- Ezra Pound

"My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. "
- Ezra Pound

"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension."
- Ezra Pound

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
- Ezra Pound

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."
- Ezra Pound

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder."
- Ezra Pound

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Meandering while we wander . . .

Today is the birthday of Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (October 29, 1882 – January 31, 1944), novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright.

"I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life."
- Jean Giraudoux

“A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal”
- Jean Giraudoux

"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
- Jean Giraudoux

"There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people..."
- Jean Giraudoux

"When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome."
- Jean Giraudoux

"It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for."
- Jean Giraudoux

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Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Jonas E. Salk (October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995), medical researcher and virologist. He is best known for his discovery and development of the first safe and effective polio vaccine.

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
- Jonas Salk

"What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other."
- Jonas Salk

"Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else."
- Jonas Salk

"I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams."
- Jonas Salk

“I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.”
- Jonas Salk

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."
- Jonas Salk

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 27/28, 1466/1469, Rotterdam – July 12, 1536, Basel), humanist scholar and philosopher.

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"What is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?"
- Desiderius Erasmus

"I am a citizen of the world, known to all and to all a stranger."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"The desire to write grows with writing."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Your library is your paradise."
- Desiderius Erasmus

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Today is the birthday of Dylan Marlais Thomas (October 27, 1914 – November 9, 1953), writer and poet.

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
- Dylan Thomas

"He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest."
- Dylan Thomas

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
- Dylan Thomas

"The function of posterity is to look after itself."
- Dylan Thomas

"Somebody's boring me. I think it's me."
- Dylan Thomas

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Meandering in ideas . . .

Today is the birthday of Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970), author, journalist, attorney and lecturer. He is best known for his book, Think and Grow Rich.

"All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea."
- Napoleon Hill

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things!"
- Napoleon Hill

"First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination."
- Napoleon Hill

“Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.”
- Napoleon Hill

"Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."
- Napoleon Hill

"It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."
- Napoleon Hill

"Truly, thoughts are things, and their scope of operation is the world, itself."
- Napoleon Hill

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Meandering along . . .

Today is the birthday of Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998), historian and educator.

"The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought."
- Henry Steele Commager

“History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.”
- Henry Steele Commager

“A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. Free society must fertilize the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.”
- Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."
- Henry Steele Commager
“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
- Henry Steele Commager

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