“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, known it, died in it. … Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”
Wallace Stegner
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, I:5
William Shakespeare
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they’re really not. They’re companions – the hero and the sidekick.
~ Laurence Shames
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
- Hermann Goering (as told to Gustav Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials)
We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and experiences, but to be whittled and sandpapered until what’s left is who we truly are.
Arianna Huffington
On Becoming Fearless: …in Love, Work, and Life