Fighting the Current

gleaned from my collection...

It's funny, the things I was once most proud of are nothing like what I thought they were. I find old writings, my quote file, artwork, you name it, and nothing is how I remember it. Which is both good and bad. Good, because I have improved. Bad, because I feel the need to correct errors.

Going through my quotes file, trying to pick a favorite. Thought I'd share those in the running... There are quite a few. You've been warned.

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."
- Henry Ford

"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat,
I say only that the cat died nobly."
- Arnold Edinborough

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The human spirit is stronger than anything that happens to it."
- C.C. Scott

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering."
- Arthur C. Clarke

"Imagination rules the world."
- Napoleon Bonaparte

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within."
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

"To thine own self be true."
- William Shakespeare

"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really
good at heart."
- Anne Frank [This was written only months before she died of typhoid or typhus (can't remember) at Bergen-Belsen.]

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."
- Maya Angelou

"Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans."
- Betty Talmadge

"It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit."
- Antorne de Rivarol

"More important than what we have is who we are."
- Socrates

"The most beautiful thing a person can do is change."
- Marc Ponzio

"A real friend is someone who walks in when the rest of the world walks out."
- Walter Winchell

"I count myself as nothing so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends."
- Shakespeare

"Do not ever fear to think."
- Bram Stoker, Dracula

"The years teach much the days can never know."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
- Marcus Aurelius Antonius

"Not all those who wander are lost..."
- J.R.R. Tolkien

"I can sum up everything I've learned about life in 3 words: it goes on."
- Robert Frost

"In the midst of winter I discovered there was within myself an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus

"To be left alone on a tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excrutiating beauty of full freedom and the threat of external indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."
- Maya Angelou

"A man must stand in fear of just those things
that truely have the power to do us harm,
of nothing else, for nothing else is fearsome."
- Dante's Inferno,
Canto II, 85-87

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you will not see the shadows."
- Helen Keller [I love her quotes, they are so paradoxical.]

"We are free to the degree we have knowledge; it is the quality of our knowledge that measures the degree of our freedom."
- Jean-Paul Desbiens

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."
- Goethe

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."
- Alexander Graham Bell

"The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory... and is challenged by such irregularities."
- F. Barron

"The universe is wider than our views of it."
- Henry David Thoreau

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
– Walt Disney

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
– Albert Einstein

"All the fun's in how you say a thing."
– Robert Frost

"Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense."
– Robert Frost

"May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope."
- Traditional Irish Curse [Had to break the chain of inspiration and thought provocation.]

"Never cut what can be untied."
- Portugese proverb [This one keeps popping up. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it in the past few weeks. And, of course, now I can't remember if I saw it or dreamt it or what... I remember the highlighting I used, but I haven't seen this document in a year or so, and had forgotten I had the quote... Argh... I need to regain a solid sense of time.]

"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials."
- Chinese Proverb

"What you can not avoid, welcome."
- Chinese Proverb

"To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed."
– Chamfort

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Solitude scares me. It makes me think about love, death, and war. I need distraction from anxious, black thoughts."
- Brigitte Bardot [This quote is me in a nutshell.]

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that is was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T. E. [Thomas Edward] Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia] (1888 - 1935)

"It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear."
- Edward Henry Harriman

I have narrowed my choices, albeit, not by much.