Favorite Quotes: "I have the instincts..."

"I have the instincts--have them deeply--if I haven't the forms of a high old civilization."

      Henry James, The American

Favorite Quotes: Having lots of friends is like having lots of books

"By having a great many friends I do not prove that I have wide appreciation of human excellence.  You might as well say I prove the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy all the books in your own study.  The answer is the same in both cases--'You chose those books.  You chose those friends.  Of course they suit you.'  The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.  The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day.  In my experience it is affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who 'happen to be there.'  Made for us?  Thank God, no.  They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed."

     C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Favorite Quotes: We are all lunatics...

"We are all lunatics trying to stick pins into their own points, and it is thus that our frantic efforts to set the world to rights, and to extend our control over all happenings, inner and outer, are themselves the cause of most of our troubles.  All force is tension against the stream.

Everywhere there are now people absorbed in projects to change the world or to change themselves, and they will simply perpetuate, or merely change the form, of the very troubles they intend to avoid.  This is not to say that human life and conduct is inevitably a tragic mess.  It is to say that human life--and all life--does not work harmoniously when we try to force it to be other than what it is.

      Alan Watts,  Cloud-Hidden:  Whereabouts Unknown, A Mountain Journal.

Favorite Quotes: The backside of heroism...

"...But then the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.  They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that.  But achievement is smaller than men think.  What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul."

       Ursula LeGuin, "Sur"

Favorite Quotes: Ambiguity and the Meaning of Life

"Rather than asking for the meaning of life as if it were a single or comprehensive pattern that permeates all existence a priori, we do better to investigate how it is that life acquires or may be given a meaning.  This meaning is generally ambiguous, as Simone de Beauvoir argues in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity.  Criticizing the absurdists, she states:  'To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning.'  Beauvoir prefers the idea of ambiguity because 'to say that it [existence] is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.'  In other words, ours is not an absurd existence in which we seek for absolute meaning although we are convinced that the universe does not afford any such thing.  Rather we are creatures who create meaning for ourselves without having objective and unambiguous criteria by which to determine how we should do so."

     Meaning in Life:  The Creation of Value by Irving Singer

Favorite Quotes: Female Friendships

"Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves."

             from Among Women by Louise Bernikow

Favorite Quotes: "the path is the thing that matters"

"...the only certain thing at all is the worn path.  The habit of love cuts through confusion and stumbles or contrives its way out of difficulty.  It remembers the way even when it forgets, for a dumbfounded moment, its reason for being.  The path is the thing that matters."

     from "Is Phoenix Janckson's Grandson Really Dead?"  The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty

Favorite Quotes: "...unhappy in unwise shoes..."

"Middle aged women, outsize in linen dresses, were huddled three or four to a table, their great legs battling for room in inadequate space, their feet hot and unhappy in unwise shoes."

          Alan Trevor, The Boarding House

Favorite Quotes: Remember this Ghandi quote?

"Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

             Ghandi

Favorite Quotes: We're never really fooling one another...

"In some essential way, we are always speaking the truth to one another and--on a physical level, at least--always understanding one another."

I don't know where I found this quote.