Thought for the Week

Culture and Society--185 (fall of 2001)

Thinker

February 21^st

February 14^th

"There wouldn't be a sky full of stars if we were all meant to wish on the same one." Frances Clark

February 7^th

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress." Hendrik Willem Van Loon

January 31^st

"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish." Michelangelo

January 24^th

January 17^th

January 10^th

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. William Faulkner

January 3^rd

" Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,--himself, his hungering neighbor, and me." James Russell Lowell

December 27^th

"Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time. Goethe

December 20^th

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

December 13^th

"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." George Bernard Shaw

December 6^th

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." Confucius

November 29^th

"Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time." Goethe

November 22^nd

"Out of respect for things that I was never destined to do, I have learned that my strengths are a result of my weaknesses, my success is due to my failures and my style is directly related to my limitations." Billy Joel

November 15^th

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds." Goethe

November 8^th

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

ctober 26^th

October 19^th

Ocober 12^th

"Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give." Ralph Waldo Emerson

October 5^th

"I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west....We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future...." Henry David Thoreau

September 28^th

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress." Hendrik Willem Van Loon

September 21^st