L'Amour, Louis
Landers, Ann.
Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.
Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future, and it does not brood over the past. It's the day-in and day-out chronicle of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and working toward common goals.
If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that are missing. If you don't have love in your life, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Lao-Tzu. Tao Te Ching
Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
Lebowitz, Fran
Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
Lewis, C. S.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.
Lawrence, D.H..
I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
Leys, Simon. The Analects of Conficius. Translation & Notes.
Politics is an extension of ethics.
Montesquieu considered that an increase in law-making activity was not a sign of civilization - it indicated on the contrary a breakdown of social morality.
Liebman, Wayne.
...Man has a small furnace in his abdomen. It is called the Tan Tien (pronounced don-CHEN), and a man uses it to burn his sufferings. The idea is not that by doing so he gets rid of his pain, but that he turns his pain into fuel which makes him stronger.
In a strange way, fear is the only guide to be completely trusted. The next step seems always to come out of a place of darkness, out of the tension of not knowing. The crux of "What now?" lies in your own experience, in containing the apprehension of uncertainty and being willing not to know and not to be told.
Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams
If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move.
Hypothetically, time might be smooth or rough, prickly or silky, hard or soft. But in this world, the texture of time happens to be sticky. Portions of towns become stuck in some moment in history and do not get out. So, too, individual people become stuck in some point of their lives and do not get free.
Just now, a man in one of the houses below the mountains is talking to a friend. He is talking of his school days at the gymnasium. His certificates of excellence in mathematics and history hang on the walls, his sporting medals and trophies occupy the bookshelves. Here, on a table, is a photograph of him as captain of the fencing team, embraced by other young men who have since gone to university, become engineers and bankers, gotten married. There, in the dresser, his clothes from twenty years, the fencing blouse, the tweed pants now too close around the waist. The friend, who has been trying for years to introduce the man to other friends, nods courteously, struggles silently to breathe in the tiny room.
A world without memory is a world of the present. The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life. By reading its pages daily, he can relearn the identity of his parents, whether he was born high or born low, whether he did well or did poorly in school, whether he has accomplished anything in his life. Without his Book of Life, a person is a snapshot, a two-dimensional image, a ghost. In the leafy cafes on the Brunngasshalde, one hears anguished shrieking from a man who just read that he once killed another man, sighs from a woman who just discovered she was courted by a prince, sudden boasting from a woman who has learned that she received top honors from her university ten years prior. Some pass the twilight hours at their tables reading from their Books of Life; others frantically fill its extra pages with the day's events.
With time, each person's Book of Life thickens until it cannot be read in its entirety. Then comes a choice. Elderly men and women may read the early pages, to know themselves as youths; or they may read the end, to know themselves in later years.
Some have stopped reading altogether. They have abandoned the past. They have decided that it matters not if yesterday they were rich or poor, educated or ignorant, proud or humble, in love or empty-hearted - no more than it matters how a soft wind gets into their hair. Such people look you directly in the eye and grip your hand firmly. Such people walk with the limber stride of their youth. Such people have learned how to live in a world without memory.
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
Lincoln, Abraham
We must ask where we are and whither we are tending.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Loest, Robert.
All morality is biological.
We all arrive at a point when the weight of our past becomes so great we must shed some of it in order to be able to go on. Those who are conservative by nature chose not to do so.
Growth means giving up things. That's hard, more so for some than for others.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Lorenz, Konrad
The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are.
Long, Huey P.
Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.
Luce, Clare Boothe
Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.
Luther, Martin.
Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and ban women? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshipped; shall we then pluck them out of the sky?
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
So rabbi and preacher, pooh-bah and high priest do well to understand the deadly pretext of their vocation. But for our mortality there'd be no need for churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues.
Funerals press the noses of the faithful against the windows of their faith
Vision and insight are often coincidental with demise. Death is the moment when the chips are down. That moment of truth when the truth that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets and apostles. Faith is not required to sing in the choir, for bake sales or building drives, to usher or deacon or elder or priest. Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love.
It is no special genius that leads me to the truth that folks in their right minds don't like funerals.
Give it a rest is the thing I say. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the missus or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a canon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care.
Lynes, Russell.
Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
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