Quote of the day

So I know we already have a thought of the day thread in this forum and I know there are quite a few quotes on there but I wanted there to be a whole thread just for quotes. It doesn't have to be anything related to permaculture or homesteading but it totally can be if you want.

I generally try really hard to be an original thinker, and I try to have my own thoughts and insights. It is something I highly value. BUT sometimes I just LOVE sitting on my butt after a long day of thinking and just soak up smart people's wisdom. That is why I am creating this thread. Of course I would love for the quotes to inspire you to think about something, but just in case you have had enough thinking and processing for the day, you can just come to this thread and just veg out on some good ol quotes from other people.

Here is my first one:

"be softer with you. you are a breathing thing. a memory to someone. a home to a life" - nayyirah waheed

In a society that strives to make us feel never good enough, this short quote really resonates. We sometimes need to stop being so hard on ourselves.

Here's another one: "Don't worry about becoming a loser. You definitely will become one. However, you do get to choose what kind of loser you will be. " I find this kind of heartwarming. I have decided to become a loser in the worlds of high fashion, momentary prestige, knowledge of TV sitcoms, competition for number of apps purchased, shiny new expensive retail acquisitions, video games, maximum alcohol consumption competition, and maximum hours at work.
John S
PDX OR

This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. I never get tired of reading it. I will put my favorite part in bold.

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

Cassie for your last quote how can i put 20 thumbs up

Unfortunately only one thumbs up can be given, although I appreciate the hypothetical thumbs up. It truly is one of my absolute favorites. It changed my life when I was really young and in high school. I never knew that there was any other way to think than the way my parents and teachers and pastors told me to think.. Then I came across this. Re-examine all that you have been told. I loved it. It made me think for myself for the first time. Now I am the black sheep of my family, but I would rather be that then have no original thoughts and opinions of my own.

"Every now and again, you will feel a dull ache in your soul. A gentle humming around your heart. A longing for something without a name. If I ever told you to obey anything, this would be it. Listen to the call of your authentic self; that part of you that lives just outside of your own skin. Let it have its way with you. I have died a hundred times trying to ignore it." - Mia Hollow

I love this. Don't we all try to ignore it?

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot".
- D.H Lawrence.

"Well, if we who do see the absurdities of the old superstitions never unveil them to others, how is the world to make any progress in the theologies? I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
― Henry David Thoreau

I have always loved that one by Thoreau, Dave.

One of my favorites by Maya Angelou:

"What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good."
Maya Angelou

To thine own self be true ! And it follows as the night follows the day thou canst not then be false to any Man !


I wish this was a little easier to live up to ! Big AL

allen lumley wrote:To thine own self be true ! And it follows as the night follows the day thou canst not then be false to any Man !

I wish this was a little easier to live up to ! Big AL

I feel that. How am I supposed to be true to myself when I feel like I don't even know myself sometimes?!

"It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences." - Aristotle

That is why I think the handbooks for using chemical farm and garden products are more popular than "Permaculture : A Designers Manual" by Bill Mollison

"Nobility is not being better than some other person. True nobility is being better than your former self."

I love this thread, I don't have specific quotes but i love to read all of yours. you make my afternoons thoughtful, it's nice cause I read your quotes when in my time zone, Italy, it's afternoon, and in the States you're just waking up. the fact permies is a global world dominating project gives us this shifted time thing. Or maybe it's just that I'm always on permies and I watch the traffic change when we enter the States time zone.
Permies.com starts to move, stretch it's arms, after a last yawn and before a cup of coffee, quotes start to warm things up.

Lorenzo Costa wrote:
Permies.com starts to move, stretch it's arms, after a last yawn and before a cup of coffee, quotes start to warm things up.

That's a really cool observation Lorenzo. I am really glad you enjoy it.

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
- Edith Wharton

Well the last one I found this morning
we're dodging time zones

-Turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to the light; show yourselves!-
Hakim Bey

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it."

- Dave Grohl

"There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning." - Abbie Hoffman

this quote is very strongly tied to permies.com I came to know Dick Proenneke from one of the threads here. so I watched the movies and found them awesome.
One thing he said struck me, it may seem a meanigless thing, but I loved it. I wake up very early around 5.30 and i love to watch dawn, the sun rise and the thin air, this is why I guess what he said got under my skin.
this is my quote for todays awakening of permies:

"It seems a shame for eyes to be shut when such things are going on"

Dick Proenneke

you can read it in many way's even more profound than just refered to the beginning of a day

Good morning permies!

"I am learning everyday to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be, to inspire me and not terrify me.”
- Tracee Ellis Ross

"Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." - Buckminster Fuller

sometimes a squirrel forgets where she hides her nuts, sometimes those nuts grow in to a plant, the best thing is when the squirrel climbs up the tree she seeded earlier and from there looks at the world

readapted by me from something I heard once

"Let passion devour laziness." - Christopher Poindexter

"the secret of life is simple, there are only two real things, a problem you can fix and one you cannot, if you can, then shut your complaining and fix it, if you cannot, shut your complaining for it will not fix it" A C Quinn

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] "Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore."

- Kurt Vonnegut

I love Vonnegut. And I haven't heard that one yet wayne, so thanks. I enjoyed that. Dancing animals, yes we are.



While I do love the many many sciencey parts of permaculture, I will always be a literature/philosophy/arts lover at heart.



“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
- Anais Nin

"Be as thou wast want to be," - Were the World Mine

"It is not enough to speak, but to speak true," - Were the World Mine

"Go out and preach the gospel, and if it's absolutely necessary, use words."
Saint Francis

"There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate, you must keep it pristine, clean, so that nobody has the right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody - no mother, no father, no wife, no husband - nobody, because that may be the place you go to when you meet God." - Maya Angelou

"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."
- Thích Nhất Hạnh

"People are not made of sugar. Also, one does not scare a hooker with a cock. In a nutshell - stop being so sensitive. Dealing with criticism well is an essential tool for any human who is interested in self development." - Ido Portal

The best thing of sharing knowledge is in the end you really don't know who shared what with you or from you. it's so entangled it really doesn't matter you have a sure yield. The important thing is to have someone to speak with, and permies.com is the best place. You grow day by day and you wonder how it is you came to be so deeply part of all this and when your mind became so fertile.
It must be that you just can't get out of the selfseeding permies.com ecosystem.

mine

When it comes to the natural world (as if there is another kind), the writer who opened my eyes was Edward Abbey; but, the writer who opened my mind was Wendell Berry. Here are a few from them. Both writers are mines out of which we can extract reason and truth for centuries.

“Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
EA

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. … To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.”
EA

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
WB

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
WB

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
WB

Dan, I loved the one on some good things to be said about walking.... couldn't be more true

"I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person". - Oscar Wilde

From one of my favorite poems of all time, "Invictus", by William Ernest Henley,

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."

Paraphrased quote from Oscar Wilde:
"I can resist everything except temptation."
John S
PDX OR