Quotes, Poems, & Sayings...

[Kobi]

Margaret Mead was an anthropologist known for her work on the relationship of culture and personality. Mead's early work stressed the cultural basis of gender roles while later she wrote about the biological influence on male and female behaviors, too. She became a prominent lecturer and writer on family and child-rearing issues.

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• In 1976: We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.

• Because of their age-long training in human relations -- for that is what feminine intuition really is -- women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise.

• It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

• If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

• If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

• Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

[Spirit Dancer]

Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert
can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.

Taisen Deshimaru

[spiritfemme7]

My favorite saying is, "who cares?!!!!" lol!!

[Katniss]

"Maritime" by Nizar Qabbani

In the blue harbor of your eyes
Blow rains of melodious lights,
Dizzy suns and sails
Painting their voyage to endlessness.

In the blue harbor of your eyes
Is an open sea window,
And birds appear in the distance
Searching for islands still unborn.

In the blue harbor of your eyes
Snow falls in July.
Ships laden with turquoise
Spill over the sea and are not drowned.

In the blue harbor of your eyes
I run on the scattered rocks like a child
Breathing the fragrance of the sea
And return an exhausted bird.

In the blue harbor of your eyes
Stones sing in the night.
Who has hidden a thousand poems
In the closed book of your eyes?

If only, if only I were a sailor,
If only somebody'd give me a boat,
I would furl my sails each evening
In the blue harbor of your eyes.

Katniss

[Nomad]

"nothing gives human beings pain longer or so persistently plagues the human memory than questions which have never been adequately answered. every parent who has survived a child, every lover who is lost to the one they live and breathe for, every person who realizes that they have egregiously harmed another, every culture whose prophets and wise people seem to have abandoned them to chaos has experienced great pain over the same unanswered question: 'why?'

the lack of an answer to that question, an answer we can understand and except, causes a gnawing ache in the chest and a loss of equilibrium from which we never fully recover. we only learn to go on without the sort of balance we had before and hope that one day we will learn not to notice the emptiness left behind in our hearts. this, my dear friends, is where we must come together and embrace compassion for one another with great urgency. compassion for every muslim. for every sikh. for every pagan. for every buddhist. for every jew. for every christian. for every agnostic. for every athiest. for every law abiding citizen and every criminal. for every teacher and every student. for every leader and every working person; for the poorest among us and the richest. for every woman, man and child. for every straight person and gay person. for every race, ethnicity, religion and philosophy, ability, size, shape and kind of human being we should have compassion because each and every one of these people understands the grief that arises from an unanswered 'why'. the blank, painful space of 'why?' is never filled entirely, never heals fully and it is the one thing all humans know. from this commonality all other common threads can be interwoven. we all know the grief of the unanswered 'why?' and so we know too the strength it takes to go on from that void of understanding. it is with this commonality in mind that we should begin our work toward peace. we must begin by acknowledging the grief we have in common over our own painfully unanswered 'why?' " Desmond Tutu

[Arwen]

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

[ruffryder]

"It only takes one person to change your life - You"

[ruffryder]

Explore every thought in depth. Be above the drama of the Situation. Deepak Chopra

[spiritfemme7]

"What you think about, you bring about." I read "The Secret", and watched the movie, it's amazing and so true! (have a vision board too!) I recommend it to anyone and everyone!

[Kobi]

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, worked first as a nurse where she learned first-hand of the health and social problems of too many pregnancies. Margaret Sanger spent time in jail to fight for sex education, and for distributing contraceptive information and contraceptives. Margaret Sanger lived long enough to see the practice of birth control declared a constitutional right (for married couples) in 1965.
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• No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

• Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

• When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.

• Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.

[The JD]

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." - Noam Chomsky

[Janstevie]

No one looks back on their life and remembers the nights they got plenty of sleep.

[Kätzchen]

“Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic,” — John Henry Jowett


“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude,” — Denis Waitley


”The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.” — Richard Bach


“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” — Marcel Proust

[Kobi]

Rebecca West (1892 - 1983) was the pen name of Cicely Isabel Fairfield. A feminist, social critic and public intellectual, her range of topics and genres was wide. Her son, Anthony West, was a product of her long affair with H. G. Wells.

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• I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

[Katniss]

Lot's Wife

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.


Wislawa Szymbor


Katniss

[FeminineAllure]

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”
Galileo Galilei quotes

[Kent]

A clear purpose is the starting point of
ALL ACHIEVEMENT..

[Blade]

Proverbs 18:6

A fools lips brings him strife, and his mouth invites a beating.

Yeah this really is in the Bible

[Mrs Arcstriker]

Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

[Mrs Arcstriker]

Oh, and this is the quote I used in my HS yearbook...

"We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." ~ Plato

It would be a couple of decades before I would understand how true this is...