Hagenisms
The following list of quotations was compiled in the PG era (pre Google). It's also pre-meme and pre-facebook. They're part of a collection I've been hoarding for years. These days you can't scroll through your social media feed without stumbling over someone trying to sell you on their meaning of life neatly encapsulated in a little hallmark card of profundity. Cat pic + Ben Franklin quip = Wisdom. Baby pic + MLK quote = I"m tolerant. Bald eagle swaddled with a flag flying + pledge of allegiance text = I'm more patriotic than you, wanna fight about it?
It reminds me of words Kennedy spoke in 1962 at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." I hope you enjoy the collection but take your time. Give each thought the requisite time to sink in. You'd do at least that much with a fine wine, wouldn't you? Savor in silence. Maybe some night when you're dining alone . . .
I would beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. --Ranier Maria Rilke (The Essence of Wisdom, p. 14)
“Sometimes to be silent is to lie.” --Howard Zinn
“There is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.” --Elie Wiesel
“There is a marvelous story of a man who once stood before God, his heart breaking from the pain and injustice in the world. “Dear God,” he cried out, “look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in your world. Whydon’t you send help?” God responded, “I did send help. I sent you.” When we tell your children that story we must tell them that each one of them was sent to help repair the broken world - and that it is not the task of an instant or of a year, but of a lifetime.” --David J. Wolpe (Teaching Your Children About God)
APPRENTICESHIP
Life is an apprenticeship; I didn’t know that when I first raised a sail, but I know it now. We are standing on the shoulders of giants who helped describe the character of our universe long before we came along. We may like to think we are born knowing all we need to know and that what we don’t know will come to us through happenstance. But if we want to learn, truly want to learn, we must break through the protective veneer of false pride and allow the masters of the past and present to enter our lives.
We need to find those special people who contain the lore of the race and can pass on to us what we yearn to know. They may be individuals we meet personally in the classroom or the shipyard or the office down the hall. Or they may be individuals we never meet and never can meet because they belong to another age - although we know them well by the works they left behind.
If we want to write, we need a master who speaks to us in a voice that bears a kinship to our own. Early in life I chose Henry Thoreau and Willa Cather and Leo Tolstoy. If we want to paint, we need a master whose vision of light, form, and color appeals to our inner eye. If we want to compose, we need a master whose music touches our soul. If we want to sail, we need a master who knows right down to his fingertips the subtle balance among wind and sea and sail . . . --Richard Bode (first you have to row a little boat p. 182)
AWAKENINGS
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. --Thoreau (Walden, p. 196)
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes . . . They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? While some people may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. --Apple ad
BATTLES
All battles are won before they are fought. --Sun Tzu
BEAUTY
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting. --Gibran (Sand and Foam, p. 27)
BRAINS
I use not only all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow. --Woodrow Wilson
CHILDREN
A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark. --Chinese Proverb
Above all things we must take care that the child, who is not yet old enough to love his studies, does not come to hate them and dread the bitterness which he once tasted, even when the years of infancy are left behind. His studies must be made an amusement. --Quintilianus
COMPASSION
If we could only read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Real stories for the Soul p. 153)
CURIOSITY
I do not know what I may appear to the world, But to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the whole great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. --Isaac Newton
DARKNESS
When it’s dark enough men see stars. --Emerson (Stories for the Heart p. 232)
DEATH
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in a manner so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice. --Native American Proverb
If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead. --Claude McKay 1919 (“If we must die”)
DISCIPLINE
“He that conquereth his own soul is better than he who taketh a city.” --Eisenhower (American High p. 177)
DREAMERS
“Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.”
--A. Schlessinger (Age of Jackson, p. 368)
EDUCATION
Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. --Oscar Wilde
Man is the only one who knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor talk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep. --Pliny the Elder
Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. --Aristotle
EXERCISE
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. --Fredrich Niezsche
FAMILY
No other success in life-not being president, or being wealthy, or going to college, or writing a book, or anything else-comes up to the success of the man or woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up and call them blessed. --Theodore Roosevelt (Stories for the heart p. 153)
FATE
Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable night. --Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
FEAR
We grow stronger from wrestling with our fears. --Noah benShea (Jacob’s Ladder, p. 20)
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. --Marianne Williamson
GIVING
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. --Benjamin Disraeli
How mean am I when life gives me gold and I give you silver, and yet I deem myself generous. --Gibran (Sand and Foam, p. 42)
GREATNESS
A great man is one who has not lost his child’s heart. -- Mencius
HABIT
The chains of habit are generally to small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. --Samuel Johnson (Real stories for the Soul p. 45)
HAPPINESS
If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy. So you must find out how to become happy yourself. Wanting to reform the world without discovering your true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes. --Ramana Maharshi (The Essence of Wisdom p. 69)
HATRED
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. --Eldridge Cleaver
HELP
It is we who are lost when we don’t help others to find their way. --Noah benShea (Jacob’s Ladder, p. 145)
HISTORY
“The past is no row of bare facts waiting to be memorized by school children. Nor does it stand in our backyard like an old picket fence, slowly and silently rotting. The past is a real world, inhabited by villains and heroes and regular folk passing this way on swift journeys. Their story is our story-the tie that binds each generation to all the others.” --Bill Moyers
HOME
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in. --Robert Frost
IGNORANCE
Those from whom we do not learn reflect only our own ignorance. --Noah benShea (Jacob’s Journey, p. 14)
INEXPERIENCE
Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is; we marry without knowing what it is to be married; and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience. --Milan Kundera
INFERIORITY
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. - Eleanor Roosevelt
JUSTICE
How can I lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep upon feathers are not more beautiful than those who sleep upon the earth? --Gibran (Sand and Foam, p. 9)
You cannot judge any man beyond your knowledge of him, and how small is your knowledge.
KINDNESS
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom. --Theodore Rubin
That I feed the hungry, forgive an insult, and love my enemy - these are great virtues. But what if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and most impudent of offenders are all within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then? --Carl Jung
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle. --Plato
LIVING
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. --Robert Pirsig (Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance)
We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we can take it, and deal with it - and that is what really counts in the end. How to take the raw stuff of life and make it a thing of worth and beauty - that is the test of living. --Joseph Fort Newton
The fact that our task is exactly as large as our life makes it appear infinite. --Franz Kafka
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors, if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And only if we arrange our lives in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Ranier Maria Rilke (The Essence of Wisdom p. 10)
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mahatma Gandhi (Chicken Soup vol. VI. p. 343)
LOVE
Love is no more
Than the breath of a rose,
No more than the breath of a rose . . . --Langston Hughes
LUCK
Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering the farmer’s daughter. --Julius Comroe
MASKS
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself. --Marguerite Yourcenar
It is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false. --Nietzsche
MATURITY
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. --Wilhelm Stekel (in Catcher in the Rye)
MISTAKES
Learn from the mistakes of others, for you don’t have enough time to make them all yourself! --(Wisdom: Little Books of Virtue, p. 31)
MONEY
Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. --Thoreau (Walden, p. 193)
OPTIMISM
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential - for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never. --Soren Kierkegaard
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars. --Rabindranath Tagore
PAIN
A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand. What longing built our bodies and around what grains? --Kahlil Gibran (Sand and Foam, p. 4)
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; and you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. --Gibran (The Prophet, p. 53)
PARENTING
Parents need to fill a child’s bucket of self-esteem so high that the rest of the world can’t poke enough holes in it to drain it dry. --Alvin Price
Making the decision to have a child - it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart walking around outside your body. --Elizabeth Stone
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth. --Peter Ustinov
If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. --Jacqueline Kennedy
PEOPLE
Who in our lives are the flowers we see as weeds? --Noah benShea (Jacob’s Journey, p. 56)
PERSISTENCE
We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are. --Tobias Wolfe (In Pharaoh’s Army)
PLANNING
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. --D. Elton Trueblood (The Life We Prize)
PREJUDICE
As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means that you cannot soar as you otherwise might. --Marian Anderson
REDEMPTION
There will be more joy in heaven over the tears of one repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred good men. --Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)
STRENGTH
We are only as strong as what we struggle with. - - Noah benShea (Jacob’s Ladder, p. 110)
You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link. This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link. To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam. To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy. --Gibran (The Prophet, p. 86)
Life is often heavy only because we attempt to carry it . . . But I do find strength in the ashes. You see, each of us is alone. Each of us is in the great darkness of our ignorance. And each of us is on a journey. In the process of our journey, we must bend to build a fire for light, and warmth, and food. But when our fingers tear at the ground, hoping to find the coals of another’s fire, what we often find are the ashes.
And, in these ashes, which will not give us light or warmth, there may be sadness, but there is also testimony. Because these ashes tell us that somebody has been in the night, somebody else has bent to build a fire, and somebody else has carried on. And that can be enough, sometimes. - -- Noah benShea (Jacob the Baker, p. 113)
SUCCESS
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong - because someday you will have been all of these. -- George Washington Carver
How well you do is determined not just by our gifts and grit, but also by social background, networks, family connections and - powerfully - by how well our parents did. Life is not merely a foot race, but a relay race. It matters a lot how much headway the previous runner has made when he hands you the baton. --William Rasberry
TEACHERS
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. --Gibran (Sand and Foam, p. 58)
A seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence? If this is my day of harvest, in what fields have I sowed the seed, and in what unremembered seasons?
We cannot teach people anything, we can only help them discover it within themselves. --Galileo
TIME
The moments that the world ignored filled his plate. --Noah benShea (Jacob the Baker, p. 62)
TRUTH
Telling the truth the way we want to hear it is often the way we lie to ourselves. --Noah benShea (Jacob’s Journey, p. 90)
WISDOM
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. - Wil Durant
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. --Marcel Proust (Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs)
. . . in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. --Aeschylus (quoted by RFK after JFK’s assassination)
WORK
The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it. --John Ruskin
. . . men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost . . . they are employed . . . laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. --Thoreau (Walden, p. 10)
Comments