Eighty Quotes - page 7

[People] think of saints as people who lived an awfully long time ago and whose validity has disappeared. I think of them as people who didn't live such a long time ago, only a few hundred years or so. There must have been something about them that impressed people who were very much like me. What was it? And they must have been much more like somebody living today than we commonly think. What was behind it? What made these people special and what made a lot of other people regard them as special, either hating them or loving them? This is fascinating. It enlarges the whole world, and because it does so, it gives you great hope and sympathy with the future. You find yourself not an isolated miserable little wretch who has got seventy or eighty years to struggle along and then perish like nothing. You are the continuer of a very great tradition which you are going to pass on to the next lot. And you're right in the middle of the great stream of life. You see? Wonderful thing. (Robertson Davies)
So many green streams and blue hills, but to what avail ? This tiny creature left even Hua To powerless! Hundreds of villages choked with weeds, men wasted away; Thousands of homes deserted, ghosts chanted mournfully. Motionless, by earth I travel eighty thousand li a day, Surveying the sky I see a myriad Milky Ways from afar. Should the Cowherd ask tidings of the God of Plague, Say the same griefs flow down the stream of time. View quote
Mao Zedong
Good! A method can be used without physicians, gold, or magic, Go out into the open field and start to dig and cultivate; keep your body and your spirit in a humble and restricted sphere, sustain yourself by simple fare, live with your herd and spread your own manure on land from which you reap your nourishment. Believe me, that's the best procedure to keep your youth for eighty years or more. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe