Mote Quotes

How will he see to cast out the mote from his brother's eye, who has the beam of anger in his own eye? (John Cassian)
If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?... Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective - who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled - can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. ... The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley Kubrick
Your Excellency's favor of the 22d was delivered to me this afternoon. I am happy to find you have wrote so fully to Congress, upon the disagreeable consequences that may follow from starving the Quarter master's department at this critical season. I wish it may have the desired effect, and rouse their attention; but I must confess I am afraid the stupor is so great, that nothing can alarm their fears, or pro mote a spirit of industry.
Nathanael Greene
I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
Carl Sagan
A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote, "And on this frail eyelash he walked," I said, "And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat."
Karl Shapiro
In other men we faults can spy, And blame the mote that dims their eye Each little speck and blemish find To our own stronger errors blind.
Benjamin Franklin
Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape-outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we're born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.
Fredric Brown
To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.
George MacDonald
Into the woods thenceforth in hast she went, To seeke for hearbes, that mote him remedy; For she of hearbes had great intendiment, Taught of the Nymphe, which from her infancy Her nourced had in trew Nobility: There, whether it divine Tobacco were, Or Panachaea, or Polygony, She found, and brought it to her patient deare Who al this while lay bleeding out his hart-bloud neare.
Edmund Spenser
The sunshine of thine eyes, (O still celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. The sunshine of thine eyes, Oh, let it fall on me! Though I be but a mote of the air, I could turn to gold for thee.
George Parsons Lathrop
Your own malice is the bitterest of all evils. Is it then possible to correct malice by means of evil? Having a beam in your own eye, can you pull out the mote from the eye of another? (John of Kronstadt)