Some Quotes for April 2025 (#36)
Donald R. Gannon, Mary Oliver, Niels Bohr, Alexandra Schwartz, Paul Graham, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sagan, Demetri Martin
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I stumbled on, usually online. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
Where facts are few, experts are many. –Donald R. Gannon
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. –Mary Oliver
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth. –Niels Bohr
The tears of strangers are only water. –Russian proverb
From “Just Bewtween Us”: The paradox of fiction is that we come to feel real things for fake people. When we gossip, we start at the other end, with real people, then embellish and decorate until they become characters. To gossip well—ethically, and aesthetically, too—a person needs sympathy alongside judgment: not merely information but imagination…Good gossip, like good literature, wants to catch its subjects moving, alive. –Alexandra Schwartz
From “How to Do Great Work”: There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. –Paul Graham
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. –William Butler Yeats
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. –Carl Sagan
A guy said to me, “I’m sorry, I thought you were somebody else.” I said, “I am.” –Demetri Martin
Thank you for the quotes. Great words to share.