Mark Van Dine

"A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time."

"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."

"I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant."

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor."

"While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and Time demands his due"

"Sell your cleverness ... and purchase bewilderment."

"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."

"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."

"When men hate or blame you, or say hurtful things about you, look deeply into their hearts and see what kind of men they are. You'll see how unnecessary it is to strain after their good opinion. Yet you must still think kindly of them. they are your neighbors. The gods help them as they do you, by dreams and oracles, to win their hearts' desires."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."

"I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake ... which I also keep handy."

"Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of."

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience"

"Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?"

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened."

"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."

"The cure for anything is salt water -- sweat, tears or the sea."

"She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions."

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

"If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

"Do not pray anymore; the sky is deaf."

"When you tell me that you were unpopular as a child,
and that your mother spoke of you in a rueful
tone of voice, and that all this seemed to go on
for a very long time, the slow time that it took
for you to grow up, I believe you, and I enjoy
thinking about that odd, awkward child.

The grapevine flower, you know, is nothing much,
but the ripened fruit gives pleasure to men and gods."

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

"I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure."

"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind."

"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children."

"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."

"When a man's verses cannot be understood nor a man's good wit
seconded with the forward child, understanding,
it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical."

"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

"The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

"I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests."

"Nature has no outline. Imagination has."

"Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

"To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state."

"But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe."

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile."

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

"... the important thing is to, first of all, question everything you read or hear or see or are told. Question it, and try to see the world for what it actually is, as opposed to what someone or some company or some organization or some government is trying to represent it as, or present it as, however they've mislabeled it or dressed it up or told you."

"Mysteries are not necessarily miracles."

"They are Losers, doomed like blind pigs in a jungle of snakes and hyenas."

"... inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened."

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

"He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike."

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. "

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward."

"At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All who war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood."

"If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem."

"Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on."

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

"It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay antiquity its due reverence."

"When mathematical propositions refer to reality they are not certain; when they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

"i suppose the human race
is doing the best it can
but hells bells thats
only an explanation
its not an excuse"

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

"When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so, of course, I was surprised."

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

"He wondered, as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. ... But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong."

"The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is: Don't we all anyway? Might as well get paid for it."

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

"He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that at times Imaginations are assigned to him which at first he must forego understanding; he must receive them as Imaginations and let them ripen in his soul as such. In spiritual experience, much depends on a man having the patience to make observations, at first to simply accept them, and to wait with understanding them until the right moment arrives. "

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

"If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

"I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near

another one

do what you can."

"As soon as I figure out what that means, I'll deliver a crushing reply."

"Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us."

"Every exit is an entry somewhere."

"Every child comes with the message that God is not yet tired of the man."

"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion."

"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

"Often we tell ourselves, "Don't just sit there, do something!" But when we practice awareness, we discover that the opposite may be more helpful: "Don't just do something, sit there!""

"Expectations are resentments under construction."

"Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'est born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
Nowhere
Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,

Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three."

"There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one."

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not ureasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on."

"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."

"I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:

ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE

I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more."

"Life is short, the craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult."

"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology."

""The four great what?" Mrs. Glass interrupted, but cautiously. Zooey put a hand on each side of the washbowl and leaned his chest forward a trifle, his eyes on the general background of enamel. For all his slightness of body, he looked at that moment ready and able to push the washbowl straight through the floor. "The Four Great Vows," he said, and, with rancor, closed his eyes. "'However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.' Yay team. I know I can do it.""

"The world is a bridge; pass over it but build no house upon it. The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion."

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good."

"They do Him wrong, who take God in one particular way. They take the way, and not God."

"In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present."

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove -
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will - sing for our time too."

"There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer."

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive... .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?' Then it was quiet again."

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Romania."

"See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk."

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."

"I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things."

"We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

"All your life you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque."

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

"Do not be daunted
by the enormity
Of the world's grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated
To complete the work,
But neither are you free
to abandon it."

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

"There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."

"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little."

"In the midst of Winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible Summer."

"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."

"only if there are angels in your head will you
  ever, possibly, see one."

"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom."

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

"1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity."

"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

"What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

"In the last century, a tourist from the United States visited the famous Polish rabbi Hafez Hayyim. He was astonshed to see that the rabbi's home was only a simple room filled with books. The only furniture was a table and a bench.

"Rabbi, where is your furniture?" asked the tourist.

"Where is yours?" replied Hafez.

"Mine? But I'm only a vistior here."

"So am I," said the rabbi."

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

"Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want."

"The Fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them."

"You don't always understand [poetry]? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it ... whenever."

"You, yourself, must make the effort, the buddhas are only teachers. The thoughtful who enter the Way are freed from the bondage of sin. He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong is full of sloth, whose will and thoughts are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to enlightenment. Strenuousness is the path of immortality, sloth the path of death. Those who are strenuous do not die; those who are slothful are as if dead already."

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?"

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet ... the planet ... the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!"

"All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost."

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it."

"You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

"When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt."

"Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him."

"This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it."

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

"Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'"

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice."

"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not ... and a sense of humor to console him for what he is."

"Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow."

"Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time."

"Fall seven times, stand up eight!"

"Into this wild abyss,

The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and looked awhile,
Pondering his voyage. . ."

"'What would Jesus do?'?! What sort of silly question is that? The real question is, 'What would Batman do?'"

"In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is."

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

"You may force me to say what you wish; you may revile me for saying what I do. But it moves."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

"There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them."

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."