Some Interesting Quotations

There is no meaning of life; there is only the experience of living. (Joseph Campbell?)

God: All that is. (Scott Nearing)

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. (Empedocles)

God is a myth, and the Bible, Koran, Talmud, etc. are its mythologies. (?)

One can but admire the ingenuity of the mind freed from the tyranny of evidence. (?)

The search for certainty often ends in the acceptance of superstition. (?)

Say not "This is the Truth" but "So it seems to me to be as I now see things I think I see". (Inscription above a doorway at the German Officers School in Kiel - in "Rising From The Plains" by John McPhee)

A person is not old until regrets take the place of hopes and plans. (Scott Nearing)

But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker with them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. (Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams in 1814)

When you're dead, you really are dead. (?)

Good is better than evil because it's nicer. (Al Capp via Mammy Yokum)

Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. (Confucius: 551-479 BC)

The thing which most dignifies man is the pursuit, whether for the joys of discovery and revelation, or through pain and disillusionment, of truth. (Robert Ormes, p. 188 in "Farewell to Ormes")

... I gradually gave it up with that very modified sense of disappointment that one gradually feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent form of philosophy, for you soon learn that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow mortals are too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation. At the theatre, at a concert, an exhibition, you always find that, before you arrive, there are enough people in the field. You are a tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and the perpetual sense of other elbows and knees begets a yearning for the desert. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park" - an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of the grassy shade, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. (Henry James, pp. 95-6 in "English Hours" - 1877)