a shandean commonplace book

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. George Eliot, Silas Marner

    His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow ; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.                     George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bar...

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.                        Gwendolyn Brooks

The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things that you’d thought special, particular to you. And there it is set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.                     Alan Bennett, The History Boys

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!                        Henri-Frederic Amiel

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Education”

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. Leo Rosten

Each act of tenderness amends the violence of history. Toi Derricote

Nothing can make our lives, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.                        Leo Tolstoy

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. Vaclav Havel

The moment one gives close attention to anything, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller

The idea is essentially repulsive of a society only held together by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interests. John Stuart Mill