Entry 238

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Shakespeare

Spend time every day listening to what your muse is trying to tell you.

Saint Batholomew

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

Sir Philip Sidney

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

John Updike

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

Thomas Campbell

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

Horace

Entry 237

Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse


The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann Hesse


If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse


It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.
Hermann Hesse

All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.
Hermann Hesse

The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
Hermann Hesse

Love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse

Entry 236

I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
George Bernard Shaw

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

Henry Miller

Only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
Anton Chekhov

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

Pablo Neruda

Entry 235

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

Hunter S. Thompson

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.
Martin H. Fische

I think religion is bad and drugs are good.
Bill Maher

Entry 234

I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery.

Joan Rivers

One popular new plastic surgery technique is called lip grafting, or "fat recycling" wherein fat cells are removed from one part of your body that is too large, such as your buttocks, and injected into your lips; people will then be literally kissing ass.

Dave Barry


I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
Rita Rudner


If anybody says their facelift doesn't hurt, they're lying. It was like I'd spent the night with an axe murderer.
Sharon Osbourne

Entry 233

There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.
George W. Bush
May 11, 2001


My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen.
George W. Bush
Aug, 13, 2001


I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.
George W. Bush
May 12, 2008



A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind.
George W. Bush
April 6, 2008

As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.
George W. Bush
On the No Child Left Behind Act
Sept. 26, 2007


I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.
George W. Bush Greater Nashua, N.H
Chamber of Commerce
Jan. 27, 2000

Entry 232

Funny Man…

R.I.P.

When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?

George Carlin

When someone asks you, “A penny for your thoughts”, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

George Carlin

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, “What do Chinese mothers use?” Toothpicks?

George Carlin

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

George Carlin

You live 80 years and at best you get about six minutes of pure magic.

George Carlin

People have been bought by toys and gizmos in this country.

George Carlin

Entry 231

When people ask if the United States can afford to place on trial the president, if the system can stand impeachment, my answer is, "Can we stand anything else?"

George McGovern

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
Arthur Schlesinger

Bush is smart. I don't think that Bush will ever be impeached, 'cause unlike Clinton, Reagan, or even his father, George W. is immune from scandal. Because, if George W. testifies that he had no idea what was going on, wouldn't you believe him?

Jay Leno

Entry 230

Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We have a president for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.

Robin Williams

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
George W. Bush

Entry 229

Thou art the Mars of malcontents.

William Shakespeare

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow

When the chairman introduced the guest speaker as a former illegal alien, I got up from my chair and yelled, “What’s the matter, no jobs on Mars?” When no one laughed, I was real embarrassed. I don’t think people should make you feel that way.

Jack Handy

The thing that sets Mars apart is that it is the one planet that is enough like Earth that you can imagine life possibly once having taken hold there.
Steven Squyres

Entry 228

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Mark Twain

As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists.
Joan Gussow

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows---and china.
Charles Dickens

Cows have no business in horseplay.
Jamaican proverb

Entry 227

Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.
George Carlin

Plans are being discussed as to who will replace Dick Cheney if he has to resign for health reasons. It's not easy for President Bush, he can't just name a replacement. He would first have to be confirmed by the oil, gas and power companies.
Jay Leno

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
Ralph Nader

Clearly, we need more incentives to quickly increase the use of wind and solar power; they will cut costs, increase our energy independence and our national security and reduce the consequences of global warming.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.

BARACK OBAMA

Entry 226

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms born to bring forth the angelic butterfly that flieth unto judgment without screen?
Dante Alighieri


Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.
David Gerrold


We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.
Winston Churchill

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Entry 225

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht

A little water is a sea to an ant.
Afghan proverb


An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.
Lao Tzu

Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant,
and she fell on me? Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.
Jack Handy

Even Kings and emperors with heaps of wealth and vast dominion cannot compare with an ant filled with the love of God.
Guru Nanak

Be on alert, like the red ant that moves with its claws wide open.
African proverb

Entry 224

Last night the United States dropped four 2,000 pound bombs on Saddam Hussein. I don't know anything about explosives, but, my God, do those things even need to explode?

David Letterman

Some Democrats say the estimated $60 billion dollar cost of a war with Iraq could be better spent at home. When he heard that, President Bush agreed and announced plans to bomb Ohio.
Jay Leno

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
George Orwell

Entry 223

She is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

William Shakespeare

NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.

Ambrose Bierce

If God hadn't intended for us to eat animals, 
he wouldn't have made them out of meat!
  IGnatius T Foobar

Frogs have it easy. They can just eat what bugs them.
Unknown

The frog is a diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear. The libretto of his favorite opera, as written by Aristophanes, is brief, simple and effective --"brekekex-koax"; the music is apparently by that eminent composer, Richard Wagner. Horses have a frog in each hoof --a thoughtful provision of nature, enabling them to shine in a hurdle race.

Ambrose Bierce

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
                William James

Entry 222

We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.

Phyllis Diller

More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.

Bertrand Russell

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
Benjamin Franklin

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
Will Rogers

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Teachers teach more by what they are than by what they say.

Anonymous

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

William Arthur Ward

The whole art of teaching is the only art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy.

Anatole France

Entry 221

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
Steven Wright

Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley


We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
Thomas Campbell

Entry 220

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg


I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates


Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot


Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent van Gogh


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray

Entry 219

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippototamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl Sandburg

I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten 'em.
Hilaire Belloc

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
"If this should stay to dine", he said,
There won't be much for us!
Lewis Carroll