The artist, the teacher and the creator (Quotations)

"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
Joseph Conrad

"...he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always served beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organizing life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."
Boris Pasternak (from Doctor Zhivago)

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith."
J.B. Priestley

"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal 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: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950

"It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
My three had these things in common. They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell - the catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious."
John Steinbeck ("On Teaching")

A Womens's Life

How can a man know what a woman's life is? A woman's life is quite different from a man's. God has ordered it so. A man is the same from the time of circumcision to the time of his withering. He is the same before he has sought out a woman for the first time, and afterwards. But the day a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. She becomes another woman on that day. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the first day of her first love another. That continues all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without a child. She carries the fruit of her womb for nine long months in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child dies, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this the man does not know; he knows nothing.
an anonymous Abyssinian woman

Unending Love (Rabindranath Tagore)

"You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the hear of time, love of one for another."


I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the hear of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting, the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

The Human Story (Quotes)

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us in nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

"Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses... And who [in this general carnage] will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... So it is accomplished... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death."
Josef de Maistre

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Voltaire

"The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War."
Mark Twain

"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."
James Anthony Froude

"The essence of education is not to stuff you full of facts, but to help you discover your uniqueness, to teach you how to develop it, and then show you how to give it away."
Leo Buscaglia

"For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
Proverbs 2 3:7

"A man's character is his destiny."
Heraclitus

"The mind is the man, and knowledge mind; a man is but what he knoweth."
Francis Bacon

"What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Great men are they who see that spiritual thought is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Progress of Culture)

"Two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe. The more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."
Immanuel Kant

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in your life, you will have been all of these."
George Washington Carver

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
Aristotle

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
G. K. Chesterton (Everlasting Man)

"Nor do I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I think I was not born in vain, and I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home."
Cicero (Tusculanes Disputationes)

"Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live; but which one of us has the happiest prospect is unknown to anyone but God." (Plutrach, On Banishment )

"I am the poet of the Body and the poet of the Soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me and pains of hell are with me.
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. "
Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

"I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."
Viktor Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul)

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
George Orwell (1984)

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"They think to order all things wisely; but having rejected Christ they will end by drenching the world with blood."
Fyodor Dostoyevski (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Our difficulties are not a transitory state of affairs... No, they are the normal state of affairs and we should reckon on being angustia temporum ['in straightness of times,' Dan. 9:21] all our lives, so far as the good we want to do is concerned."
Charles de Foucauld

"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
Michel Eyquen Montaigne

The peace of wild things (Wendell Berry)

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

When you are old (W. B. Yeats)

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid face amid a crowd of stars.

On Man and Animals

"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."
- Leo Tolstoy


"Our task must be to free ourselves... widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
- Albert Einstein


"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mohandas Gandhi


"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for whites or women for men."
- Alice Walker


"It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed. It was once considered foolish to suppose that black men were really human beings and ought to be treated as such. What was once foolish has now become a recognized truth. Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


"It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


"Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes and dingoes - by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal- health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year, sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
- David Coats from Old MacDonald's Factory Farm


"Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true of almost every one of us!"
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky


"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
- Thomas Edison


"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipients has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
- Milan Kundera


"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them, that's the essence of inhumanity."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer


"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."
- Francis of Assisi


"Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilization than other creatures, and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena."
- H. Jay Dinsah


"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."
- Abraham Lincoln



On Eating Animals


"If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling -- killing."
- Leo Tolstoy


"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
- Leo Tolstoy


"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
- Leonard Da Vinci


"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are burial places."
- Leonardo Da Vinci


"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
- Albert Einstein


"It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
- Albert Einstein


"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."
- Henry David Thoreau


"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."
- Franz Kafka


"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer


"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"
- Peter Cheeke


"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffering of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands (Now Millions) of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."
- Romain Rolland (1915 Nobel Prize)


"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country...Some people scoff at vegetarians, but they have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate. They outlive other men by about six years now."
- Dr.William Castelli, M.D.


For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
- Pythagoras (6th Century BC)


"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"
- George Bernard Shaw


"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
- George Bernard Shaw


"We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
- Robert Louis Stevenson


"Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of of human treatment of the non-human, but vegetarianism is now as necessary pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the early church...Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."
- Stephen Clark


"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out."
- Alice Walker


"The animals, you say, were "sent" for man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, why came they ions before man did, to spend long centuries on earth awaiting their devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from heaven, were, sure, the maddest gift ever given "sent" for man's use (can man believe it?) when there was no man to receive it!"
- Henry Salt (1851-1939)


"But to deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct is transcendently iniquitous and dire!"
- Porphyry (233-304)


"All living beings love their life, desire pleasure, and are averse to pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life, and to every being, his life is very dear" This is the quintessence of wisdom: Not to injure any living being."
- Lord Mahavira (599-527 BC)


"The eating of meat extinguishes the great seed of compassion."
- Buddha (563-483 BC)


"In 1968 I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do."
- Cesar Chavez



On Animal Research


"I abhor vivisection. It should be at least curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could have not been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil."
- Dr. Charles Mayo (Founder of the Mayo Clinic)


"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."
- Dr. Christian Barnard


"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
- Mark Twain


"Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?"
- Carl Sagan


"During my medical education at the University of Basel I found vivisection, horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary."
- Dr. Carl Jung


"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
- Leo Tolstoy