Non Vi, Sed Arte Et Cor – 'Not by Force, but with Art and Heart!'
Category: Favorite Quotes
Some of my favorite quotes. Usually from books, movies or tv shows. Occasionally from figures throughout history who have summed up some nugget of wisdom in a profound, memorable or entertaining way.
“She wondered, faintly, if it was immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked?”
– Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
PERSONAL NOTE: Too cynical? Perhaps. I’ve wondered the same. I think, however, that I’d rather hope than not. Yes, if you don’t maintain hope, you won’t be disappointed; but if you don’t hope, you will also be just as miserable the whole time as you would be for the far shorter periods of disappointment you might experience. Also, I like to believe the positive attitude that Hope provides decreases the frequency with which you will be disappointed, as you will be more likely to make the sacrifices or changes necessary to achieve your goals if you have Hope, versus the cynical expectation of failure and the associated “Why bother?” mentality that goes with it.
“Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.”
– Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
PERSONAL NOTE: Holy crap this seems incredibly true from my experience of struggling for acceptance in a relationship with someone who uses guilt in place of love, where the concept of Unconditional Love is a fantasy, versus a reality of Lingering Resentments. I’m not sure if the cost of belonging in such situations is worth it, but I do wonder sometimes the reverse: if deciding to not pay that cost in one person’s case is worth not belonging.
“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
– HG Wells
PERSONAL NOTE: Commonly attributed to H.G. Wells, but I have been unable to find a definitive source in online searches for this from his published works, letters, or papers. Regardless of whether he actually said it, I believe it holds a deep Truth, as I find this is what meditation does for me.
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
– Helen Keller
NOTE: As usual I later looked back for the original source of this quote and verify its attribution to Keller. Turns out she did say it, but some original version of the saying was around before then, and its many sources and variations is muddled if interesting (to me). Regardles, the saying is another of those that I find very True.
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. … And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.” Moby Dick, Chapt. 49, by Herman Melville (1859)
I know that Melville here was talking about the effect that those people risking life and limb come to experience in the height of danger; the “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy” that life-threatening experiences engender. But even without physical danger there have been times — often in the midst of psychological or emotional tribulations but sometime even when all is well with the world — that I have had that feeling that the Universe is some Great Joke… And that the joke is on me.
It’s not necessarily a bad feeling. After all, I don’t mind being the butt of a joke… As long as it’s a good one.
But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe those times where you feel that everything is a joke is a faint understanding of how infinitesimally small everything you experience, think, feel and perceive actually matters in the grand scheme of things. That’s not to say that we are unimportant. But when you put our individual lives beside the Universe as a whole, how laughable and ludicrous it is to think that whatever is going on in our lives is the be all, end all of… of anything.
It really is quite funny when you think about it. No, really. Let’s think about it for a moment. Consider the three images I have included in this post’s header image… Continue reading The Great Joke
“It’s easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?” — Lorien
More sci-fi philosophy…
This quote is from Babylon 5, Season 4 Episode 2 ‘Whatever Happened To Mr. Garibaldi?’. The series as a whole has some great quotes, but this episode alone had a bunch of powerful lines, most coming from the enigmatic character of Lorien, ‘The First One’.
The quote above comes from the beginning of an exchange between the character of Sheridan and Lorien, which ends a few lines later with these two lines: Continue reading Worth Living For…
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
I love this quote and it means many things to me. Just this line alone is awesome, but the entire stanza of the poem that it comes from is also pretty amazing and deep and bears quoting too. So for good measure, here’s that stanza:
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
