Sunbeams

Time to plant tears, says the Almanac.

Elizabeth Bishop

The absence of the dead . . . is their way of appearing.

Simone Weil

There are years when nothing happens and years in which centuries happen.

Carlos Fuentes

Death doesn’t take the time to knock on the door.

Yiddish folk saying

The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.

Eric Hoffer

The first and greatest commandment is, Don’t let them scare you.

Elmer Davis

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

Acknowledging fear is not a cause for depression or discouragement. Because we possess such fear, we also are potentially entitled to experience fearlessness. True fearlessness is not the reduction of fear; but going beyond fear.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Chief Roman Nose of the Cheyenne, and his people, believed he was immortal, and he, and they, were right every day of his life except one.

Richard Paul Haight

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

Albert Camus

Without your wounds where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.

Thornton Wilder

War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes . . . as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

Adrienne Rich

It is simply not true that war never settles anything.

Felix Frankfurter

The most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

Katherine Anne Porter

When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box.

Italian proverb

Now you know the worst / we humans have to know / about ourselves, and I am sorry.

Wendell Berry

Even for our enemies in misery, there should be tears in our eyes.

Charan Singh

And this is the simple truth — that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Søren Kierkegaard