Quotes of faith

Quotes of faith

Prayer is a concentration of positive thought. —Peace Pilgrim, Her Life
and Work
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all
there is in a language he has barely mastered. —Leonard Cohen, “F.,”
Beautiful Losers, 1970

Asked if she worshiped regularly: Honey, at my age, I don’t do anything
regularly. —Selma Diamond, Funny Women, Unterbrink

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I
realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn’t work that way. So I just
stole one and asked him to forgive me! —Emo Philips, stand-up routine,  

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe
be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner
confessedly unworthy.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

The Soul unto itself / Is an imperial friend— / Or the most agonizing
Spy— / An Enemy—could send —Emily Dickinson, No. 683, Poems,
Johnson
What soul is without flaws? —Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 1873

Go out and be born among gypsies or thieves or among happy worka-
day people who live with the sun and do not think about their souls.
—Pearl S. Buck, “Advice to Unborn Novelists,” 1949

Spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational. —Sam Harris,
The End of Faith, 2005

He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there
was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always
included service to others. —Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, 1999

I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into
a small thimble, and found room to move there—wide room. —Olive
Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 1883

A single Screw of Flesh / Is all that pins the Soul —Emily Dickinson,
No. 262, Poems, Johnson

Of the enemies of the soul— / the world, the devil, the flesh— / the
world is the most serious and most dangerous. —Gabriela Mistral, “We
Were All to Be Queens,” Felling, 1938

His soul is about the size of a toenail. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of
the Heron, 1978

We will try to be holy, / We will try to repair the world given to us to
hand on. / Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds /
that moves inside us. —Marge Piercy, The Art of Blessing the Day, 1999

In essence, the search of so many people today for the mystical wisdom
of an earlier time is the search for the kind of spirituality characteristic
of a partnership rather than a dominator society. —Riane Eisler, The
Chalice and the Blade, 1994

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself
are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to
the merest puff.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof—that’s a drink that only the
most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. —Aldous Huxley,
Island, 1962

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more
certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not
lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but
through striving after rational knowledge. —Albert Einstein, Out of My
Later Years, 1950

The difference between science and religion is the difference between
a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new argu-
ments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. —Sam Harris, Article
in The Huffington Post, 2006

The soul can split the sky in two, / And let the face of God shine
through. —Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence,” 1917

Everyone’s conscience in religion is between God and themselves, and
it belongs to none other. —Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, 166

her awful Mate / The Soul cannot be rid —Emily
Dickinson, No. 894, Poems, Johnson

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal
Opposition.
—Woody Allen, Stardust Memories, 1980

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have
given us religion. —Martin Amis, article in The Guardian (London),
2002

Religion has become so pallid recently, it is hardly worthwhile being an
atheist. —Paddy Chayefsky, The Tenth Man, 1959

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the
rest of the week. —Alice Walker, letter to the editor, Ms. (1974), In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 1983

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a
person’s life. —Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2005

Why is it more ridiculous to arraign ecclesiastics for their false teach-
ing and acts of injustice to women, than members of Congress and the
House of Commons? —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible,
1895

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny
way to heaven, / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself
the primrose path of dalliance treads. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet,
1600

Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the tempo-
ral power should not become too important in any Church. —Eleanor
Roosevelt, letter to Cardinal Francis Spellman (1949), quoted by Joseph
P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 1972

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Quotes on school

Quotes on school

They are called finishing-schools and the name
tells accurately what they are. They finish
everything ….
—Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They
keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter
than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole
racket. —Anita Loos, quoted in The Observer (London), 1973

Man’s knowledge of things will begin to be matched by man’s knowl-
edge of self. The significance of a smaller world will be measured not in
terms of military advantage, but in terms of advantage for the human
community. It will be the triumph of the heartbeat over the drumbeat.
—Adlai Stevenson, speech (Springfield, Illinois), 1952

They know enough who know how to learn. —Henry Adams, The
Education of Henry Adams, 1907

Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. And then
look, every day, at the choices you are making and when you ask
yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me.
—Anna Quindlen, commencement address, Mount Holyoke College
(South Hadley, Massachusetts), 1999

The things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, c. 325 b.c.e.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauli-
flower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. —Mark Twain,
Pudd’n’head Wilson, 1894

Willie had left school after the ninth grade. He said there was really
nothing more they could teach him. He knew how to read and write
and reason. And from here on in, it was all propaganda. —Gloria
Naylor, Linden Hills, 1985

You can’t learn everything you need to know
legally.
—John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with
gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. —Carl Gustav
Jung, “The Gifted Child,” (1942) The Development of Personality, R. F. C.
Hull, tr., 1954

What is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total devel-
opment lags behind? —Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, 1967

My brain: it’s my second favorite organ. —Woody Allen, Sleeper , 1973

I’ve got more brains in my little finger than I have in my entire head!
—Goodman Ace, Easy Aces radio show, 1930s–1940s

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it
keeps its brain. —J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
1999

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more
fascinating and complex than any response it
can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 1971

My nephew is in high school. He’s a member of the abstinence society,
where a group of students have pledged to maintain their virginity. We
had something similar at my high school—it was called the math club.
—Brian Kiley, Jokes, Getlen

Nothing would more effectively further the development of educa-
tion than for all flogging pedagogues to learn to educate with the head
instead of with the hand. —Ellen Key, The Century of the Child, 1909
You don’t appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little
things, like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman—stuff
you pay good money for later in life. —Emo Philips, Jokes,

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up. —Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad,
1869

Grant that I may be successful in molding one of my pupils into a per-
fect poem, and let me leave within her deepest-felt melody that she may
sing for you when my lips shall sing no more. —Gabriela Mistral, “The
Teacher’s Prayer,” Desolacion, 1922

True knowledge consists in knowing things, not words. —Mary
Wortley Montagu, letter (1753), Letters

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. —John Irving, The Hotel
New Hampshire, 1981

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that
is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot
stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is
well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. —Mark
Twain, Following the Equator , 1897

College is something you complete. Life is
something you experience.
—Jon Stewart, commencement address, College of William and
Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia), 20 May 2004

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner.
We used to write essays like “What I’m Going to Be If I Grow Up.”
—Lenny Bruce, Jokes, Getlen

Don’t you believe ’em when they say that what you don’t know won’t
hurt you. Biggest lie ever was. See it all and go your own way and
nothing’ll hurt you. If what you see ain’t pretty, what’s the odds! See it
anyway. Then next time you don’t have to look. —Edna Ferber, Show
Boat, 1926

There can be no education without leisure, and without leisure education
is useless. —Sarah Josepha Hale, Godey’s Lady’s Book (passim), 1837–1877

… the lovely satisfying unity of things—the wedding of the thing learnt
and the thing done—the great intellectual fulfillment. —Dorothy L.
Sayers, quoted by Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and
Soul, 1993

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale
manufacturer of misunderstanding? —Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 1969

No facts taught here are worth anything until students have assimilated
them, correlated them, interpreted them. It is the student, not the bit 
of knowledge, that we are teaching. —Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, motto,

I’m not a fan of facts. You see, the facts can change, but my opinion
will never change, no matter what the facts are. —Stephen Colbert, 
The Colbert Report

She always says, my lord, that facts are
like cows. If you look them in the face hard
enough they generally run away.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 1956

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wher-
ever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be
tethered on a ten-foot chain. —Adlai Stevenson, speech, University of
Wisconsin (Madison), 1952

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or
system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important
subject which we as a people can be engaged in. —Abraham Lincoln,
address to the people of Sangamo County, 1832

So this gentlemen said, “A girl with brains ought to do something else
with them besides think.” —Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1925

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