quoting literature

 "Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday"

-unknown

Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual...

- Elbert Hubbard

Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labors to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.

-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome." --George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed (1998)

"Let us cease to consider what perhaps may never happen, and what, when it shall happen, will laugh at human speculation. We will not endeavour to modify the motions of the elements or to fix the destiny of kingdoms. It is our business to consider what beings like us may perform, each labouring for his own happiness by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others."

Samuel Johnson.

"On average, however, the fact remains that in America the existential vacuum is more manifest than in Europe. This is due to the exposure of the average American student to an indoctrinatino along the liens of reductionism. To cite an instance, there is a book in which man is defined as "nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism power by a combustion system which energizes computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information." By offering our students such reductionist concepts of man we are reinforcing their existential vacuum. A study of physicians by R.N. Gray and associates showed that during medical school cynicism as a rule increases, while humanitarianism decreases. Only after completion of medical studies is this trend reversed but unfortunately not in all subjects. Small wonder when we define man as nothing but "an adaptive control system". Values are defined as nothing but "homeostatic restraints in a stimulus-response process." According to another reductionist definition, values are nothing but reaction formations and defense mechanisms. As for myself, I am not prepared to live for the sake of my reaction formations, even less to die for the sake of my defense mechanisms. The reductionist interpretation of values is likely to undermine and erode the enthusiasm of youth."
-Vicktor Frankl

I've been reading Alan Alda's Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, and other things I've learned, and I came across this section and fell in love with it.

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If you're interested in memoirs, I highly recommend this one.

"It is the mind which creates the world about us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched."

I got these quotes from an email a friend sent me. I just had to share...

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"In literature the ambition of a novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it." - George Bernard Shaw

(Just a little something for my fellow Lit/English majors. You know it's true.)