Vilhelm Ekelund

To read fast is as bad as to eat in a hurry. 

Abraham Lincoln

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. 

Maria Sanford

"...vehement and gusty, leonine, hale, and lusty." 

Maria Sanford was an educator born in 1836. She became one of the first female college professors in the country when she accepted a professorship of history at Swarthmore in 1871, though she migrated to the University of Minnesota in 1880. Sanford was the first woman to deliver a commencement speech at a university and was a frequent public speaker at a time when it was considered inappropriate for women to speak in public. She was known for her ability to project her voice to the back of any room. On her eightieth birthday, the University of Minnesota held an event to celebrate her long career, and someone recited a speech that described her with the phrase above. What a woman! 

Charles Darwin

It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.

--From his diary account of his trip to South America

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for. 

Gustave Flaubert

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Brooks Atkinson

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

Unknown

A joy shared is a joy doubled.

Unknown

Love is blind. Friendship is clairvoyant.

Robert Maurer

When the midbrain is engaged by the repetitive movement involved in many crafts, the temporal lobe is unable to focus on worry or stress. The cortex - which controls conscious thought - becomes quiet and peaceful.

From This is Your Brain on Crafts, Martha Stewart Living, Nov 2012

Adelle Davis

We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are.

-From Let's Get Well

Sister Joan Chichester

I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

from Bill Moyers' show, Nov 2004

Carl Sagan

What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. [...] Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. Books are proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Shinichi Suzuki

To reason whether one has talent or not is to no avail. Abandon these thoughts, and use your own power to create talent.

from Nurtured by Love: A New Approach to Education. 1969, p 47.

John Daniel

A Prayer among Friends

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. May we see with clarity,
may we seek a vision
that serves all beings, may we honor
the mystery surpassing our sight,
and may we hold in our hands
the gift of good work
and bear it forth whole, as we
were borne forth by a power we praise
to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love. 

"A Prayer among Friends" by John Daniel, from Of Earth.
© Lost Horse Press, 2012.