And so to bed...

I finish each night with a quote on Facebook, and for those who have missed them, here are some recent picks. My rules for choosing them are that they must be short, but not one-liners, and must say something inspiring and joyful, or reflecting the sorrow and pain of the world.

Mainly I choose them because I like them, and I hope you, gentle reader, will like them too. On the blog I've also taken the opportunity to add a few extra pictures of the writers themselves as I think it is rather nice to see the authors as well as their quotes.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Rebecca Solnit:

There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice — and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of… We need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from John Boyle O'Reilly:

Truth, said the wise man;
Pleasure, said the fool;
Love, said a maiden;
Beauty, said the page;
Freedom, said the dreamer;
Home, said the sage;
Fame, said the soldier;
Equity, the seer;
Spake my heart full sadly,
" The answer is not here."
Then within my bosom
Softly this I heard:
" Each heart holds the secret;
Kindness is the word."

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from William A. Percy :

I felt it blow across my dungeon walls
The wind before the footsteps of the Lord!
It bloweth now across the world;
It strangely stirs the hearts of men; wars cease;
Rare deeds familiar grow; fastings and prayers,
Forgiveness, poverty; temples are built
On visioned impulses, and children march
On journeys with no end.
Far off, far off He comes,
And we are swept upon our knees
As meadow grasses kneeling to the wind.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919):

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow;
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
That tells them the way to go.
Like the winds of the sea are the winds of fate
As we voyage along through life;
'Tis the set of the soul
That decides its goal
And not the calm or the strife.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Walt Whitman:

I Tramp a Perpetual Journey
I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.
Not I nor anyone else, can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Madeleine L’Engle:

Today
we walked in the woods
in the snow
and the trees were dark
and their branches were bare.
I put my arms around a tree
and listened
and I could hear the tree,
inside,
living,
waiting,
for the time when God
will bring it back to green. Do
you do that for us, too, Lord,
when we grow old and bare?

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Peter S. Beagle:

We can put dinosaurs back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from William Shakespeare:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Dwight Eisenhower ("Ike"), 34th President of the USA:

No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. … No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.