Quotes About Engagement

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

There is a sense in which I no longer "go to work." If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am "at" my work even when I am not working. It is "my" work because I cannot escape it.

The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

The sidelines may be safer but life is played on the field

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Never choose a battle; only fight if you cannot walk away.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading

Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?

Classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody's interest, and exciting nobody's brain.

But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.

I began to doubt whether she might not be repenting of her engagement—just as young ladies often do, when repentance comes too late. On

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing, he said. All people are good except those who are idle.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child

If you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do. -Voltaire

social networking is the new dinner conversation . 

A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.