quotation: Mark Twain (on friendship)

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

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quotation: The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society. Ralph Waldo Emerson

quotation:  The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Discuss

quotation: “Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.” Ambrose Bierce

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Discuss

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quotation: Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. Herman Melville

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss

[youtube.com/watch?v=sVK9aaTEWbE]
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QUOTATION: James Fenimore Cooper – A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it.

A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Washington Irving

A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Herman Melville

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored…

Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss

QUOTATION: Ambrose Bierce

Academy: A modern school where football is taught.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution–such call I good books.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

QUOTATION: Mark Twain

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

 

QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau

I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Booker T. Washington ABOUT WORK

Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Ambrose Bierce

The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

 

QUOTATION: Ambrose Bierce ABOUT NOSES AND THEIR FAVORITE RETREAT!

It has been observed that one’s nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of others, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

QUOTATION: Ambrose Bierce

A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Discuss

 

QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau ABOUT EVIL

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

Quotation: Henry David Thoreau about undue respect for a law

A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers … marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

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QUOTATION: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Discuss

 

Word: INEXPUGNABLE

inexpugnable 

Definition:	(adjective) Incapable of being overcome, challenged, or refuted.
Synonyms:	impregnable
Usage:	I felt the inexpugnable strength of common sense being insidiously menaced by this gruesome, by this insane, delusion. Discuss.

 

Quotation: Herman Melville

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity … ? Surely all this is not without meaning … But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss

 

Quotation: Mark Twain on patriotism vs. institutionalism

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

 

Quotation: Henry David Thoreau about our place in the world (what it should be…)

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

Quotation: Ralph Waldo Emerson about flattery

We love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Discuss

 

QUOTATION: Henry David Thoreau

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

Quotation: Herman Melville

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss

 

Quotation: Ambrose Bierce about revolutions’ beneficiaries

Revolutions are usually accompanied by a considerable effusion of blood, but are accounted worth it—this appraisement being made by beneficiaries whose blood had not the mischance to be shed.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Discuss

 

Quotation: Mark Twain

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

 

Quotation: Booker T. Washington about oppression

Oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) Discuss

 

Quotation: Mark Twain on life and death

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

 

Quotation: Henry David Thoreau about being “men first, and subjects afterwards”!

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

Quotation: Henry David Thoreau about Unjust laws

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Discuss

 

Quotation: Mark Twain

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

 

Quotation: Mark Twain

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) Discuss

 

Quotation: Herman Melville

Insensible as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing cares, may not the savage be the happier man of the two?

Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson about first journeys discoveries, a fool’s paradise

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Discuss

 

Dvořák / String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96 “American” (Cleveland Quartet)

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, B. 179 “American” (1893)

00:00 – Allegro ma non troppo
09:08 – Lento
16:14 – Molto vivace
20:00 – Finale. Vivace ma non troppo

Performed by the Cleveland Quartet (Telarc, 1991).

“From its first performance, Dvořák’s ‘American’ Quartet has enjoyed lasting popularity for its tunefulness, its rhythmic verve, and its happy interplay of the four instruments.

This Day in History: “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” (1951)

“The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” (1951)

Late in the 1951 baseball season, the New York Giants trailed far behind their crosstown rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the standings. However, the Giants went on a winning streak, and the two teams finished the regular season with identical 96-58 records. In the first two games of a three-game playoff series, the teams traded wins. In the bottom of game three’s ninth inning, the Giants were trailing 4-2 with two men on base when Bobby Thomson came to bat. What happened next? More… Discuss