Quotes September 04, 2021

Inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.
Daniel Webster,
lawyer, statesman
 
 
 
 
That’s most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
 
 
 
 
I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.
Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
 
 
 
 
I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
 
 
 
 
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.
Margaret J. Wheatley
 
 
 
 
The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.
Richard Schickel
 
 
 
 
“Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
Gustave Flaubert
 
 
 
 
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Albert Einstein
 
 
 
 
A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories
 
 
 
 
My basic view of things is — not to have any basic view of things.
Ingmar Bergman,
film director, screenwriter, producer
 
 
 
 
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
John F. Kennedy
 
 
 
 
I now tried a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be.
Michelle Obama – Former First Lady of the United States-Author-Attorney
 
 
 
 
The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.
David Bowie, New York Times, 2002
 
 
 
 
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
Mahatma Gandhi – 1869-1948 – Lawyer-Nationalist