"I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity." ~ from the film, Short Bus

"All the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it." ~ from the film, No Country for Old Men

"It's never too late to be who you might have been." ~ George Elliot

On May 2, 2006, Terry Gross interviewed Philip Roth on NPR's "Fresh Air."

TG: "In the reading that you did at the beginning of our interview, your main character dismisses religion as being superstition, as being childish. Is there any part of you that ever wishes that you were a believer, that you were a man of faith and believed in some kind of eternal spirit after death?"
Roth: "I have no desire to be irrational."
TG: "A lot of people would say that it might be irrational but that rationality only goes so far in this world."
Roth: "If only it went further."
TG: "So there isn't any part of you at all that wishes that you could believe."
Roth: "I have no taste for delusion."

"The less you know, the better you sleep."

"Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think." Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning physicist

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

"We choose our past in the light of a certain end, but from then on it imposes itself upon us and devours us." ~ Jean Paul Sartre

"Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux." ~ Marcel Proust

"I am constantly available for the provision of useful quotations ... sorry ... gobbets. Remember, boys, festoon your answers with gobets and you won't go very far wrong." ~ Hector in The History Boys

      "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
      Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
      "Yes," I said. "Isn’t it pretty to think so?" ~ closing lines of The Sun Also Rises

"The rat is always right." ~ B. F. Skinner

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." ~John Gardner, former U.S. Secretary of Education.

"You are Miss Smith, the daughter of multi-millionaire banker Smith, aren't you? No? I beg your pardon, for a moment I thought I had fallen in love with you." ~ Groucho Marx

"No hay mal tiempo. Hay ropa inadecuada."

Revenge is the best revenge

"Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all." ~ James Balfour

" Canto mejor en la lengua que me prohíben."   ~ Joan Manuel Serrat ~

"Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, our one duty is to furnish it well." ~ Peter Ustinov

"Croyez tout ce que l'on vous dit sur le monde; rien n'est trop laid pour être impossible." Honoré de Balzac

"Our will is as free as are our options."

"If you live in a nightmare, you have to try to reimagine it." ~ Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing.To himself, he always seems to be doing both." ~ Francoise Rene Chateaubriand

"I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether." ~ Alfred North Whitehead

"La experiencia es una llama que no alumbra sino quemando." ~ Benito Pérez Galdós

"Siempre hay que seguir, aunque sólo sea por curiosidad." ~ from the film, Martin (Hache)

"Cuando estas mal, tienes que darte tiempo, dejar que pase el tiempo, y vas a estar mejor. Eso dicen." ~ from the film, Martin (Hache)

"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others." ~ Cyril Connolly

"After you've learned how to survive alone physically, how do you survive emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?" ~ Production notes of the film, Cast Away

"Nearly anybody can learn nearly anything they need to know." ~ William Jefferson Clinton, in the film Wordplay

"There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What is said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you whisper will be proclaimed from the roofs." ~ The Golspel of Luke

"Obsession is the wellspring of genius, and of madness." ~ Montaigne

"Le tact dans l'audace est de savoir jusqu'où aller trop loin." ~ Jean Cocteau

"The world is divided into good and bad people. The good ones sleep better, while the bad ones seem to enjoy the waking hours much more." ~ Woody Allen

"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

 ~ Woody Allen

"If you can find work, stay healthy, and find someone to share life with, you're the ultimate success." ~ Dick Clark

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." ~ Emerson

"The difficulty of success does not relieve one of the obligation to try." " ~ William Jefferson Clinton

"La parole est moitié à celui qui parle, moitié à celui qui écoute." ~ Montaigne

"El original es infiel a la traducción." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"God gives us children so death won't be such a disappointment." ~ Evelyn Harper, Two and a Half Men

"Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu." ~ Thomas Aquinas

"You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence." ~ Robert Frost

"Be careful what you say to students. They tend to remember."

"There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now."
~ Eugene O'Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten

"El libro que no soporta dos lecturas no merece ninguna." ~ José Luis Martín Descalzo

Two-thirds of all Americans don't understand math, and the other two-thirds don't care.

"Todo lo que es y todo lo que somos, en definitiva, es palabra." ~ Víctor García de la Concha

"Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais déjà trouvé." ~ Blaise Pascal

"La poesia é l'arte di far entrare il mare in un bicchiere." ~ Italo Calvino

"Owning your own shadow." ~ Carl Jung

"The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"En general, cada país tiene el idioma que merece." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"Where is the man who has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns?" ~ John Locke

"Dans l'instinct est la seule vérité." ~ Anatole France

"Siempre que enseñes, enseña a dudar de lo que enseñes." ~ José Ortega y Gasset

"Men give me credit for genius. All the genius I have is this: when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. What people attribute to genius is in truth nothing but the fruit of thought and incessant labor." ~ Alexander Hamilton

"C'est beau de comprendre peu à peu que l'on ne comprend rien." ~ José Maurice Maeterlinck

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. Professor ________" ~ from Wallwords

"Nothing is known. Everything is imagined." ~ Federico Fellini

"There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people." ~ Paul Oberman (I'm proud to say he was my doctoral student)

" ... without hope or agenda ... " ~ from the film "Love Actually"

"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie." ~ Wittgenstein

"Master the subject, the words will come." ~ Catone

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing." ~ Albert Einstein

"Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." ~ Anna Freud

"To love what you do and feel that it matters ... how could anything be more fun." ~ Katharine Graham

"Custa tanto ser sincero quando se é inteligente! É como ser honesto quando se é ambicioso." ~ Fernando Pessoa

"It is necessary to get behind someone before you can stab him in the back."     ~ Sir Humphrey Appleby, from Yes, Prime Minister

"De lejos todo parece más pequeño, a excepción del hombre inteligente, que de lejos parece mayor." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela

"Il pessimismo riguarda l'intelligenza; l'ottimismo, la volontà." ~ Antonio Gramsci

"Time flies when you're having fun. And even when you're not." ~ Larry David, from "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

"Dubitare di se stesso è il primo segno dell'intelligenza." ~ Ugo Ojetti

"La recherche pour le bonheur est un acte de résistance." ~ Denys Arcand, from his film, "Les Invasions Barbares"

"Un proverbio es una frase corta basada en una experiencia larga." ~ Miguel de Cervantes

"He who goes furthest is the man who does not know where he is going at all." ~ Oliver Cromwell

"I don't think one necessarily needs to buy wholeheartedly into verbal persuasions; sometimes one can buy into them just enough that the the fortuitousness of life can finish the job." ~ Gio Valiante

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." ~ James Baldwin

"Un pintor es un hombre que pinta lo que vende. Un artista, en cambio, es un hombre que vende lo que pinta." ~ Pablo Picasso

"In seeking the good of others, we find our own." ~ Plato

"Nearly every meaningful act begins with apprehension and culminates with familiarity." ~ MFP

"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." ~ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"The ear commands the story." ~ Italo Calvino

"Uno es más auténtico mientras más se parece a la idea que ha soñado de sí mismo." ~ Pedro Almodóvar

"To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed." ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The French simply have no . . . je ne sais quoi." ~ Prof. Gio Valiante [struggling to find words to describe what the French don't have]

"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." ~ Thomas Szasz

"All that is known is that, in order to conceive fruitful original ideas, one must have talent, must immerse oneself in the available knowledge, and think very hard." ~ Socrates

"Angesichts von Hindernissen mag die kürzeste Linie zwischen zwei Punkten die krumme sein." (As regards overcoming obstacles, sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a curve) ~ Bertolt Brecht

"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

"The sole virtue of the ineffectual is consistency." ~ from Slings & Arrows

"En amor, cada ser que hiere a otro no hace sino vengar una herida anterior recibida en su propio cuerpo." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela

"What shall we think of a well adjusted slave?" ~ Abraham Maslow

Faster, better, cheaper ... pick any two. ~ engineering adage

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages." ~ Emerson, from Self-Reliance

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday language equivalent." ~ George Orwell

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." ~ Thomas Paine

"There is something that can happen to every athlete and every human being; the instinct to slack off, to give in to pain, to give less than your best; the instinct to hope you can win through luck or through your opponent not doing his best, instead of going to the limit and past your limit where victory is always found. Defeating those negative instincts that are out to defeat us is the difference between winning and losing - and we all face that battle every day." ~ Jesse Owens

"Elle est drôle, la légèreté avec laquelle les mauvais hommes croient que tout leur tournera bien." ~ Victor Hugo

"My reality is what my limbic system chooses to attend to." ~ Gio Valiante

"Reason consists of always seeing things as they are." ~ Voltaire

"Human nature: what makes you swear at a pedestrian when you are driving and at the driver when you are a pedestrian." ~ Oren Nialos Arnold

Weapons of mass destruction: Two boys under age 12.

"I'm not what I used to be, and never was." ~ MFP

"Behandle die Menschen so, als wären sie, was sie sein sollten, und du hilfst ihnen zu werden, was sie sein können." [If you treat people as if they were what they ought to be, you help them become what they are capable of being.] ~ Goethe

"A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace." ~ Confucius

"The obvious is always least understood." ~ Prince Metternich

"Have the uncommon thought on a common matter." ~ Sean Penn

"Every action we take alters the probability of our subsequent action." ~ MFP

"To become a thing is to know a thing." ~ Changeling in Charge to Odo, Star Trek: Deep Space 9

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
~ George Bernard Shaw

"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." ~ Winston Churchill

"There are two ways of saying no to someone you believe to be stronger than yourself. The first is to say nothing and go on merely doing what you were doing before and pretend that you never heard. Allow time and inertia to be your allies. And the second is to say no in such a kind and thoughtful way it befuddles them. Naturally, if both these strategies fail, there is nothing but to relent, or to fight. And, of course, if you decide to fight, then you also have to decide to win" ~ Frederick the Wise, from the film Luther

"We preach best what we need to learn most" ~ Johann von Staupitz to Luther, from the film Luther

"Hay que dar vida a los años mas que años a la vida." ~ Spanish proverb

"The great world, the background, in all of us, is the world of our beliefs. That is the world of the permanencies and the immensities." ~ William James

"Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives." ~ Tony Robbins

"One never trusts anyone that one has deceived." ~ Sir Humphrey Appleby, from Yes, Prime Minister

Failure should not be expensive.

"Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man." ~ Nitschke

"It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand." ~ Headmaster Brian Stimpson, from the film Clockwise

"Good habits are hard to develop, but easy to live with.
 Bad habits are easy to develop, but difficult to live with." ~ Nido Qubein

"El arte de vencer se aprende en las derrotas." ~ Simon Bolivar

"El amor es como los columpios, porque casi siempre empieza siendo diversión y casi siempre termina dando náuseas." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela

"A man alone is a neighbor of God." ~ Majid Majidi, from the film, Baran

"La Bibbia ci insegna ad amare i nostri nemici come se fossero nostri amici. Probabilmente perché si tratta delle stesse persone." ~ Vittorio de Sica.

"Jeder hält die Grenzen des eigenen Gesichtsfelds für die Grenzen der Welt." [Everyone regards the borders of his own visual field as the borders of the world.] ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"The little things . . . there's nothing bigger, is there?" ~ from the film, Abre los Ojos

"People are not evil; they are schlemiels." ~ Abraham Maslow

"Ce dessin m'a pris cinq minutes, mais j'ai mis soixante ans pour y arriver." ~ Auguste Renoir

Using Martha's recipe, Martha's psychiatrist has baked a delicate tart. They are seated on his couch tasting the results.

Martha: Not quite.
Psychiatrist: Not quite?
Martha: Something's wrong.
Psychiatrist: But I made it just the way you said. I followed the recipe precisely step by step exactly as you wrote it down.
Martha: Did you prebake the crust for fifteen minutes
Psychiatrist: Exactly fifteen minutes at precisely 200 degrees celcius.
Martha: Are you sure your oven heats up to 200 degrees when it's set at 200?
Psychiatrist: The thing is brand new.
Martha: Perhaps you kneaded the dough too long.
Psychiatrist: Not a second longer than necessary.
Martha: Then it must be the sugar.
Psychiatrist: The sugar?
Martha: Did you get the Belgian Vergeoise as I told you?
Psychiatrist: Are you telling me you can taste what kind of sugar I used?
Martha: Of course not. But I can taste which kind of sugar you didn't use.
Psychiatrist: I give up.

"Nasty little subject! Nothing in it! All one cares to know lies outside! ~ William James speaking about psychology (as cited in Simon, 1996, p. 34).

"Psychiatry is a joke, and psychology is a bad joke" ~ Linus, radio talk-show host

"Without problems to expand the limits of your capabilities, you cannot expand them" ~ Kurros, Star Trek Voyager, Season 5, episode 114

"The foie gras is perfect. It's not a matter of taste!" from the film Bella Martha

"J'ai cherché la perfection et j'ai détruit ce qui allait bien." ~ Claude Monet

"The rarest and most difficult talent to find is the talent to teach." ~ Immanuel Ax, pianist, faculty at Julliard

"Si quiers saper, amostra." [If you want to learn, teach]. ~ Cicero

Why do people close their eyes when they hug?

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." ~ Albert Camus

"Dyslexics are teople poo." ~ Bumper sticker

"The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide." ~from Fight Club

"Hard enough that it energizes; not so hard that it paralyzes." ~ MFP

"Frankly speaking, you sometimes have to get annoyed to make things work well." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Education is the only business in which the clients want the least for their money."
~ David Perlmutter, Associate Professor, LSU.

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." ~ James Baldwin

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of learning. ~ Albert Einstein

"Continuamente nascono i fatti a confusione delle teorie." ~ Carlo Dossi

"It is not enough to know what you want to know; you must know how you want to know it." ~ MFP

"Only you can stop narcisism." ~ bumper sticker

"Any use of computers that undermines face-to-face contact is potentially destructive to education."
~ Jackson Lears, The Radicalism of Tradition: Teaching the Liberal Arts in a Managerial Age

"Distance learning is to learning as phone sex is to sex; it may be better than no learning at all, but you wouldn't want to confuse it with the real thing." ~ Jackson Lears, The Radicalism of Tradition: Teaching the Liberal Arts in a Managerial Age

"It's easier to fight for your beliefs than live up to them." ~ Alfred Adler

"A psychologist is one who goes to a football match to watch the spectators." ~ Gesualdo Bufalino

"How you define a problem determines the manner in which you solve it." ~ MFP

"Il n'y a point de passion où l'amour de soi-même règne si puissamment que dans l'amour; et on est toujours plus disposé à sacrifier le repos de ce qu'on aime qu'à perdre le sien." ["There is no passion in which love of one's self reigns so strongly as being in love; one is always more prepared to sacrifice the tranquility of the person one loves than to lose one's own."] ~ François de la Rochefoucauld

"Meaning makes a great many things endurable." ~ Carl Jung

"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"I'd rather do nothing with you than something with anybody else." ~ Beaver to Wally, from Leave it to Beaver

A classic: "Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research." ~ Wilson Mizner

"Originality is undetected plagiarism." ~ William Inge

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. ~ Sigmund Freud, 1935 [in a letter to an American mother]

Quando l'uomo non ha più freddo, fame e paura, è scontento." ~ Ennio Flaiano

"In fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends." ~ William James, Principles of Psychology, Chapter 10, "The Consciousness of Self"

"I feel like Elizabeth Taylor's last husband. I know what to do, and I know how to do it. I just don't know how to make it interesting." ~ George Archibald, speaking at the 56th General Assembly of the Nova Scotia Legislature, Halifax, Canada, December 20, 1996 [*].

"You never get a second chance to make a first impression." ~ Will Rogers

"True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it." ~ Karl Popper

"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong less to what flatters us than to what scars." ~ Stanley Kunitz

"Using the elements of truth, I spun a little tale."

"I believe chance gives us the possibility to create our destiny with our will."
~ from Collected Stories.

"I'm afraid I'll disappear without leaving a trace."
"Perhaps that's why we met." ~ from The Tango Lesson.

"Scientia dependit in mores" (knowledge works its way into habits).

"Los dictadores pueden reformar las leyes, pero no las costumbres." ~ Jacinto Benavente y Martínez

"Muchas veces para ser buenos tenemos que dejar de ser honrados." ~ Jacinto Benavente y Martínez

"When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet." ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

"Eating whets the appetite." ~ from the film, Black and White in Color

"I cannot live with someone who can't live without me." ~ Nadine Gordimer

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself ." ~ Winston Churchill

As they drive down a highway, novice drivers have a tendency to focus their vision on the spot of road closest to the hood of the car. That's because they try to align the left corner of the hood with the center stripes of the highway. It was very difficult for both my kids to learn to focus on the horizon instead of on the oncoming stripes. At first, they said they couldn't keep the car straight if they didn't carefully concentrate on aligning hood with stripe. Of course, they soon realized that this narrowness of vision prevented them from seeing not only what was around them but, more important, what was ahead. ~ MFP

"Look back, look in, look ahead." ~ MFP

Although "there are things that we cannot know for sure, we can still observe phenomena and attempt to build a model that conforms to observations, as long as we allow that any model we construct is by definition incomplete. In fact, this is a condition that we should seek after - precisely because the circumscription of the domain of reason leaves 'room' for 'gaps' in thought. Where systems can not be completely known, they cannot be completely controlled." ~ Tailhard de Chardin

"It's no man's business whether he has genius or not; work he must whatever he is but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will be the things he was meant to do and will be his best. No agonies or heart-renderings will enable him to do any better; if he be a great man they be great things; if a small man, small things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable." ~ Ruskin

"The dialectic between observational data and theoretical frameworks is crucial to the working scientist. If the scientist only makes observations, he or she may be a keen observer or a naturalist, but will not have entered fully into scientific practice. That is because observations can focus on an infinite number of details culled for a variety of unspecified ends. Indeed, all of us make observations all the time, and yet few of us are practicing scientists" ~ Howard Gardner

"Tyrants put the novelists and poets in jail first." ~ Jerome Bruner

"We don't change, we just become more so."

"Lo obsceno no es la pornografía, sino que una persona pueda morir de hambre." ~ José Saramago

"When men are first thrown into prison, they recoil at the sight of a rat.
 In time, they grow accustomed to them.
 Often, they make pets of them."

Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and we miss them when removed. ~ John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum

"Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed." ~ W. C. Bennett

"Show me someone who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you someone you can beat anytime." ~ Lou Brock

"Our lives are defined by the stories we retain. Our behavior is designed by the stories we retell." ~ MFP

"You're never really done for as long as you have a good story and someone to tell it to." ~ Giuseppe Tornatore, from the film La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano

"Some people have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good." ~ Melvin Udall, from the film As Good As It Gets

"D'abord l'émotion. Ensuite, seulement, la compréhension." ~ Paul Gauguin

"Every story has a story." ~ Patricia Hampl [*]

"As man believes, so he is. All actions that we take in life, except for instinctive acts, are based on certain conscious and unconscious beliefs and presuppositions. Consequently, it is important that we understand the relationship between our actions and our beliefs." ~ Bhagaved Gita

"A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence."
~ David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.

"Ain't it funny how you're walking through life and it turns on a dime?" ~ Vonda Shepard

"Without problems to extend the limits of your ability, you cannot expand . . . "

"We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down, Trot! ~ Aunt Betsey to David Copperfield, from Charles Dickens' David Copperfield

"Only the wounded doctor can heal." ~ Carl Jung

"Researchers in this [automaticity] vein have systematically compared this power of the situation to that of the person as if the two were competing in a zero-sum game, in which evidence for the power of one necessarily diminishes that of the other. We last saw such a competition in the classic, fiercely controversial debate between social and personality psychologists, which raged in the 1970's and still simmers. Ultimately it led to the belated recognition, inevitable in all such contrversies about 'is my variable more important than your variable?' that, of course, both are important and the task is to figure out how the interactions between them work" (Mischel, 1999, p. 181).

"Why is doing something fundamentally trivial better than living a responsible life?" ~ Nelson Moss, in the film Sweet November

"When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing." ~ Adrienne Rich

"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~ Louis Pasteur

"No two persons ever read the same book." ~ Edmund Wilson

"We are now in the age of cafeteria style theorizing in which constructs are plucked from divergent theories and strung together in various combinations as alternative conceptual schemes in the name of theoretical integration." ~ Albert Bandura, 1997, p. 285. ~

"L'ignoranza peggiore é quella della propria ignoranza." ~ San Girolamo (Saint Jerome)

"It's not the elegance of the idea. It's the conviction with which we go after it."

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." ~ Albert Einstein

"We probably live our way into a system of thinking rather than think our way into a pattern of living. This means that living is more influential in determining thinking than thinking is in determining living." ~ Herman H. Horne. From "An idealistic philosophy of education" in The 41st Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I, Philosophies of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1942, pp. 139-195. Quote is on p. 141.

"If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior." ~ William Glasser

"Today's typical careerist speed around like expensive sports cars at annual conferences, racing their motors and running down anyone who gets between them and the big names who have come to give the keynote speeches. They cover themselves with chrome-plated achievements, careen around corners in white-walled certification, and jut their fancy hood ornaments into a 100-mile-a-minute future that disappointingly recedes from them despite the high octane in their fuel of ambition." ~ Marshal Gregory

"A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done." ~ Fred Allen

"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case." ~ William James

"Wait and hope." ~ Alexandre Dumas, from The Count of Monte Cristo

"No hay nada peor que el dia antes." ~ from the film, Plata Negra

"Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." ~ Basil King ... or is it Goethe?

"At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you." ~ Goethe

"Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to you." ~ Leo McGarry, on "The West Wing"

"Confidence is contagious." ~ Vince Lombardi

"Building up confidence is the trick of tricks. You have to fake it initially" ~ Julia Roberts

"Ask yourself the questions to which you would not want to know the answers." ~ Kevin Spacey

In the middle of the journey of my life,
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight way had been lost.

Opening lines of Dante's Inferno, Canto I, ll.1-3.

When the mind is morbid only the gloomy images have any vividness. We may try to realize the reverse of the picture, but it won't bite, and even concentrated reflection will fail often to give it substantiality for us. Then the only thing is to have faith and wait, and resolve whatever happens to be faithful "in the outward act" (as a philosopher says) that is do as if the good were the law of being, even if one can't for the moment really believe it. The belief will come in its time. ~ William James

If you feel below par now, don't think your life is deserting you forever. You are just as sure to be up again as you are, when elated, sure to be down again. Six months, or any given cycle of time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount, and your fretful anxiety when in a stagnant mood is frivolous. The good time will come again, as it has come; and go too. I think we ought to be independent of our moods, look on them as external, for they come to us unbidden, and feel if possible neither elated nor depressed, but keep our eyes upon our work and, if we have done the best we could in that given condition, be satisfied. ~ from a letter written by William James to his friend Tom Ward, June 8, 1866

"Preparation is a privilege. The more you put in the more you get out." ~ Russell Crowe

"Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes, et non pas de leurs maladies." ~ Molière

"I'm not even sure bisexuality exists. It's just a layover on the way to gaytown." ~ Carrie Bradshaw

"Elementary school teachers love the kids,
 High school teachers love the subject,
 College professors love themselves."
 ~ Howard Gardner

Novice teacher: "Does teaching ever get easier?"
Experience teacher: "Not if you do it right. But it's the best job in the world." ~ from Boston Public

"What makes research possible is the understanding that we are not altogether unique. Just as we are all made of flesh and bone, similar sense and similar sinew, we also share similar habits of mind and of action. Without these basic similarities, generalizations that touch on the human condition would have no reasonable foundation. Even when people seem alien to us, they tend to be alien in similar ways. In part, this is because the environment is limiting. And by this I do not mean only the physical environment, but the psychic environment within which meanings are constructed. Language, symbols. Similar people living in a similar world thinking in similar ways. Without this similarity, coherency, consistency, and mutual understandings would not be possible. Even when we find someone extraordinary, the difference is always in degree and not in kind. It is to that end that we have superlative adverbs. And IQ tests. In fact, when an individual strays too far from conduct that is similar to our own, we hardly know what to make of it. If the conduct is particularly abhorrent, the individual is dismissed as inhuman, an animal of sorts. If the conduct is particularly benign, the individual is said to be a saint, an angel, a god. In any case, not a person." ~ MFP

"In order to succeed, we must first believe we can." ~ Michael Korda

"I don't need that kind of suggestibility in my life." ~ Matt Cohen, while a student at Emory

Today
    the platitudes of life rest easy on my shoulders,
    and simple thoughts have meaning and make sense.
You are unwise to think me wise today.
    Answers are easy
    when questions are disguised
       as childhood crises
       that end up in smiles.

Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown.
Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.

~ from Lawrence of Arabia

A reminder to us all that he really said what we thought he said:

"If we are to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs, we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined. We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions. This possibility is offensive to many people. It is opposed to a tradition of long standing which regards man as a free agent, whose behavior is the product, not of specifiable antecedent conditions, but of spontaneous inner changes of course ... If we cannot show what is responsible for a man's behavior, we say that he himself is responsible for it. The precursors of physical science once followed the same practice, but the wind is no longer blown by Aeolus, nor is the rain cast down by Jupiter Pluvius." ~ B. F. Skinner, 1953.

"When all you know is discomfort, even discomfort is comforting." ~ MFP

"You can't prevent what you can't predict." ~ from the show, Desperate Housewives

"Language is a very hard thing to put into words." ~ Voltaire

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." ~Burt Bacharach

"The answer to almost everything is ... 'yeah, whatever.'" ~ Professor Gio Valiante

"Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I would say that a racing-yacht skipper who thought of nothing else but the glory of winning the race would never attain to any eminence of reputation. The genuine masters of their craft -- I say this confidently from my experience of ships -- have thought of nothing but of doing their very best by the vessel under their charge. To forget one's self, to surrender all personal feeling in the service of that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge of his trust." ~ Joseph Conrad

Most of the time you walk around thinking that you are the boss of you, that you have a unified self that controls your actions in a relatively straightforward way ... you should be empathetic but your mouth wants to smile. So the question becomes, whose mouth is it anyway? The answer is that your mouth has several masters, and some of them are brain subsystems that regulate emotional stress. Your brain is not a general purpose computer with one unified central processor. It is an assemblage of competing subsystems specialized for particular tasks, with modules simultaneously competing and relying on each other. ~ Mind Wide Open

"The Old Theories only die out when the Old Professors die out."  ~ Max Planck

"Moral virtues come from habits . . . They are not in us neither by nature, nor in despite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them, and we develop them through habit . . . these virtues we acquire first by exercising them, as in the case of other arts. Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it: men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we come to be brave." ~ Aristotle

The phases individuals go through when acquiring property:
infatuation, justification, appropriation, obsession, resale
~ the Ferengi (and they should know)

Heaven is a place in which
          the police are British,
          the cooks are French,
          the mechanics are Germans,
          the lovers Italian,
          and everything is organized by the Swiss,
Hell is a place in which
          the police are German,
          the cooks are British,
          the mechanics are French,
          the lovers are Swiss,
          and everything is organized by the Italians.

This is an actual email message sent to me after I asked for instructions
regarding how to forward my email while I was abroad:

To forward mail
1. Go to main screen.
2. Go to unix shell.
3. type "pico .forward"
4. when you get the blank screen, type the email
    address to which you want the messages sent.
    e.g., \emory username, yahoo address
5. Ctrl+x to save, and save in .forward
6. Messages stay on the server
7. Emory has disabled this feature,
    so you cannot use it

"As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more." ~ David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham . . . to which A. Danielian replied, "This might lead one to conclude that the ultimate spiritual achievement would be to have an infinite amount of faith in precisely nothing."

In an episode of the The Twilight Zone, after a burglar is shot and killed, he is met in the afterlife by a jovial fellow who introduces him to a world in which he can have anything he wants, from women to power to fame. Unfortunately, everything is totally predictable, from the role of a die to a woman's sigh. The burglar protests that everything has become boring and dull, and he requests to be shipped off to hell, where at least he could play chess with the devil. The fellow laughs and says to the shocked burglar, "What ever made you think that you were in heaven?"

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Biritsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Professor: I feel unsatisfied somehow, like I'm missing something. I keep asking myself, 'Is that all there is?'

forewonder, a zest for life ... when they're learning something new.
Doctor: Surely there must be satisfaction in teaching them.
Professor: It's not the same. I already know it.
~ Professor Walker, in the film 13 Conversations About One Thing

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"Losing comes suddenly, doesn't it?" ~ from 13 Conversations About One Thing

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"The flowers are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen." ~ The Little Prince

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"For thirty five years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being a teacher, the pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn’t possibly imagine and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. ~ William James after retiring from Harvard

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"Como no me he preocupado de nacer, no me preocupo de morir." ~ Federico García Lorca

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"La muerte me habitaba y me abandonó para habitar otro cuerpo." ~ Octavio Paz

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"It is a good thing to have had a friend, even if one is about to die." ~ The Little Prince

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"There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." ~ Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2

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"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"Todo el mundo se suicidaría, si después de suicidarse se pudiera seguir viviendo." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela

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"When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot become manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied." ~ Herophilus, physician to Alexander the Great, 325 BC

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It is not I who will die,
it is the world that will end.
~ Ayn Rand ~

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