Here lived a great person!

"What I'm saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

-- Martin Luther King

I've always loved this quote, although I give the credit to a friend of mine who sent this to me in an email this morning. I've always thought this can be attributed to anything we do in life: that 20 page paper due next week, the piles of laundry that need to be washed and dried and folded and put away, the mountains of housework that never seem to end (allusion that mothers of families will especially understand), homework that never ends (even if you finish it, you'll end up with more!), your part-time (or full-time job), your spiritual life - all these things we can do well if we put our hearts into it. "Here lived a great (fill in position/job here) who did his/her job well!" 

Here! Here!

A conversation about trees

"What times are these, where

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

Because it contains silence about so many atrocities."

-- Bertolt Brecht,

Used by Carole Fink in "Jews in Contemporary Europe"

Memory

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."

-- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

The Beauty of Human Nature

"I say we need to discover this second wing [responsibility], and how to use the first [our freedom], in order to be content as human beings. To discover the beauty in our nature…unique in each individual, but created whole and beautiful. Then our souls will soar effortlessly above the sufferings and harshness of our material world. Then our souls will rest close to the heart of God, Who made us to soar above the peaks of the mountains and the crests of the clouds, in the heights of the sky. It is then that we will discover what it means to be fully human, and to rejoice in the beauty of human nature."

-- "My Soul Cries Out With Longing: Philosophical Reflection on Beauty" in The Imaginative Conservative

Chance

"It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny."

- Benedict Anderson, 

Opening quote in "Preface" of Who Owns Antiquity, by James Cuno

Just Be

"Sometimes I think a soulmate is someone who will make you be the most 'you' that you could possibly be."

 I don't know where this quote comes from but I read it somewhere and loved it. This can be true of certain friends too.

 

I have a few of those: friends who make me the most 'me'. So much so that it is very hard when things change and people travel their separate ways. But sometimes, distance doesn't interfere...and we can be soulmates despite the miles (or years or whatever) between us.  

 

Value of an Object

"Just as objects belong to people, so do people come to belong to objects, through layered and complex histories of exchange, display and travel."

- Ruth B. Phillips, "The Travels of a Mi'kmaq Coat" in A Nineteenth-Century World Art History and Twenty-First-Century Cultural Politics

A Curious Old Chest

"'That is a curious old chest, is not it?' said Miss Tilney, as Catherine hastily closed it and turned away to the glass. 'It is impossible to say how many generations it has been here. How it came to be first put in this room I know not, but I have not had it moved, because I thought it might sometimes be of use in holding hats and bonnets. The worst of it is that its weight makes it difficult to open. In that corner, however, it is at least out of the way.'"

-- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 154-5

Invisible Dance

"For the only artist, who, besides myself, knows what the dance of seven veils is, 

and can see that invisible dance. Oscar."

-- Oscar Wilde, handwritten inscription annotated into one of his poetry volumes,

discussed in Books as History by David Pearson

Hope

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. 

Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever."

- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. It is just that sometimes you don't see it. If we let the darkness overcome us...if we stop right then and there...we will never see the light. Hope sometimes depends on us moving forward, knowing that goodness and light are just around the bend. Even when there are many bends, many twists, and great blackness. 

Hope expects that "such precious feelings" of joy and pleasure and peace are not gone for ever.