I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (4 page)

 

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself,
even though you never touch its coat-tails.

CLARENCE DARROW

A man should live with his superiors as he does with his fire;
not too near, lest he burn; not too far off, lest he freeze.

DIOGENES

In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Diogenes advocated a life of self-sufficiency and the repudiation of human luxuries. Here he offers history's oldest and best advice on “managing your boss.”

 

Without goals, and plans to reach them,
you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.

FITZHUGH DODSON

We should take care not to make the intellect our god;
it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

Make your own bible.
Select and collect all the words and sentences that
in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is.
How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.

MILLICENT FENWICK

Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

B. C. FORBES

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood.
He who faces no calamity will need no courage.
Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature
which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern,
so wisdom would probably admonish us also
not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

SIGMUND FREUD

If thou hast Knowledge,
let others light their Candle at thine.

THOMAS FULLER, M.D.

Dr. Thomas Fuller—not to be confused with the seventeenth-century English historian by the same name—was a London physician and preacher. He put together two early and important quotation anthologies, the 1731
Introductio ad Prudentiam
, and a year later
Gnomologia
. This is the original version of a saying that is commonly attributed to both Margaret Fuller and Winston Churchill: “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.” Recalling the earlier Diogenes thought about superiors, Fuller also offered this: “I do not recommend to thee the Familiarity of great Men; it's a fire that often scorches.”

 

One does not discover new continents
without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

ANDRÉ GIDE

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Goethe was writing in the late 1700s, when most people believed the devil was a real entity, capable of seizing control and causing us to do evil things, just as Satan convinced Eve to taste of the forbidden apple. In the 1970s, comedian Flip Wilson parodied this view with his signature line, “The devil made me do it.”

 

Happiness is as a butterfly which,
when pursued, is always beyond our grasp,
but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving.
To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it—
but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

Our acts make or mar us; we are the children of our own deeds.

VICTOR HUGO

Once you wake up thought in a man,
you can never put it to sleep again.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven,
spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought,
and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

WASHINGTON IRVING

In matters of principle, stand like a rock;
in matters of taste, swim with the current.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence
is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

CARL JUNG

Let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

JOHN KEATS

A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner,
so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself.

LOUIS L'AMOUR

Peter Ustinov offered a similar thought: “Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.”

 

One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature
without having that nature recoil upon itself.

JACK LONDON

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.

JACK LONDON,
his “credo,”
said two months before his death

Never mind trifles.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

These words, inspired by a 1764 Voltaire observation, come from a character in “The Story of Brother Bernardus,” in Longfellow's 1839
Hyperion.
By likening the lives of people to the tools of a blacksmith, he suggests that human beings can strike with force on the world around them or stand firm under the force of the blows they receive.

 

Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains
because he differs in opinion from you.
It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head
because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

HORACE MANN

For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves.
If they fail in this, it doesn't much matter what else they find…
and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride,
they are tossed into a bin marked “Failure.”

But if a man happens to find himself…then he has found a mansion
which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

JAMES MICHENER

Man's task is to make of himself a work of art.

HENRY MILLER

Let him who would write heroic poems make his life a heroic poem.

JOHN MILTON

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

KENJI MIYAZAWA

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Montaigne did his writing in a circular room he constructed in the tower of his family chateau. His
solitarium
, as he called it, contained his books and writing table. He outdid my Wall of Quotes with his Beam of Quotes. On the roof-beams of his room, he hand-carved approximately fifty inspirational quotations, such as Terence's “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.”

 

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then,
like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences
(deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats,
even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

ANAÏS NIN

A man's duty…is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least
to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove,
and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life.

PLATO

Remember, you are just an extra in everyone else's play.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit;
divorced from it, they remain barren.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame
by an encounter with another human being.
Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

In the late 1700s, the German man of letters Johann Gottfried von Herder offered a related thought: “Without inspiration, the best powers of the mind remain dormant; there is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.”

 

Constant kindness can accomplish much.
As the sun makes ice melt,
kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

CHARLES SCRIBNER, JR.

This is the true joy in life,
the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;
the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap;
the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod
of ailments and grievances complaining that the world
will not devote itself to making you happy.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I dread success.
To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth,
like the male spider, who is killed by the female
the moment he has succeeded in his courtship.

I like a state of continual
becoming
, with a goal in front and one behind.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.

MOTHER TERESA

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

He who has more learning than good deeds
is like a tree with many branches but weak roots;
the first great storm will throw it to the ground.
He whose good works are greater than his knowledge
is like a tree with fewer branches but with strong and spreading roots,
a tree which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot.

THE TALMUD

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

This passage from
Walden
resulted in the metaphor about
marching to the beat of a different drummer
, one of history's most popular sayings, and
a reminder to be tolerant of those who shun the crowded path and go their own way.

 

So behave that the odor of your actions
may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Follow the grain in your own wood.

HOWARD THURMAN

We can't reach old age by another man's road.

MARK TWAIN

Twain wrote this in a piece he composed for his seventieth birthday celebration at Manhattan's Delmonico's restaurant in 1905.

 

Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.

VOLTAIRE

We must cultivate our garden.

VOLTAIRE

These words come at the end of Voltaire's 1760 classic,
Candide
. Replying to a remark from Dr. Pangloss, Candide is referring to his vegetable garden, but he was also speaking metaphorically. In my years as a marriage counselor, I often reminded clients that
a relationship is like a garden.
And when we cultivate gardens, two things are necessary—nutrients must be added and weeds must be picked.

 

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it
is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD

On her final day on the
Today Show
in 2006, Katie Couric used this quotation—without crediting the author—to sum up her feelings toward co-host Matt Lauer and the others she had worked with during her fifteen years on the show.

 

But beware you be not swallowed up in books!
An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

JOHN WESLEY
, in a 1768 letter to his brother Joseph

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.

EDITH WHARTON

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

WOODROW WILSON