Joseph Perkins > Joseph's Quotes

“Learning is its own exceeding great reward.”
― William Hazlitt

“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.”
― Washington Irving

“You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“He who stops being better stops being good.”
― Oliver Cromwell

“Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”
― Allan Bloom

“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”
― Booker T. Washington

“Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.”
― William Penn

“Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you”
― Andre Gide

“There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.”
― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

“It is the vocation of the Christian in every generation to out-think all opposition.”
― Elton Trueblood

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Who will watch the watchers?”
― Juvenal

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to
succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself.”
― Charles Olson

“The path of genius is free, and its own”
― William Hazlitt

“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Take big bites. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything”
― Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life

“The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.”
― Aesop, Aesop's Fables

“Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?”
― Charles Olson

“Knowledge is the harvest of attention”
― Charles Olson

“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Whatever you have to say, leave
The roots on, let them
Dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
Where they come from.”
― Charles Olson

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“People try to live within their income so they can afford to pay taxes to a government that can’t live within its income”
― Robert Half

“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of humans are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with the quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!
And, now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
― Judith Butler