"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

"There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together."

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."

another contribution by Brooke

Flowers
by H. Barnes
It may not be the same,
But some things never change.
I feel it and I trust it,
I still believe in forever
Because that's what my heart knows.

Memories are the dew drops on our petals
That re-open the buds that have closed.
Flowers wilt as seasons change,
Though they grow a little more with rain.

The sun will shine when in need,
And left behind, a precious seed.

I think I have grown into the person I was always going to be. To say that you did not have a big part in that would be a lie. I think that you taught me a lot about loving someone without conditions...quite a concept. In that I learned to love myself. You helped me see that I was worth loving. I spent a lot of time trying to figure you out....then I just realized that I know you and I trust that...you are absolute.

Inspirations are like an image ,but dreams are like an obligation in the mind which overwhelms the mind.

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it

Random Quote I found online .... quite nice

“You've changed so much. I guess that's what happens. I wish you knew how much you changed me. I wonder if I changed you, if your life isdifferent because of me. Because mine's different. My God, you taught me so much, and now we don't even talk to each other. I guess that's what happens.”

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.”

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die; Life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes

Thanks my dear Brooke for the submission!

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

Crowds

Crowds

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

Charles Baudelaire

I'm not cynical. Just experienced.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects

Part 3

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." --George W. Bush, Fort Benning, Ga., Jan. 11, 2007

Our fearless leader .... Part 2

"Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gas? ... That's interesting. I hadn't heard that." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

Our fearless leader ....

I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree with them. - George Bush

There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.

Danny Kaye (1913 - 1987)

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings

Evan Esar

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
-Goethe

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.