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

I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.   Alice Walker

The reason we’re made of flesh that feels pain, we’re evolving to be careful creatures who handle one another with all considerateness.                         Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey

    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...

In order to improve, our definition of what it means to be human must include recognising the horrors we are capable of in societies of past and present. The systematic oppression of others and the massacre of billions of animals were done by human beings. Us. We can become better only if we realise that besides all the wonders, this is us too and it can happen again if we don’t change the ways we live together.   from The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto

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

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.  Arundhati Roy

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.                        Raymond Williams

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life.                        David Hume

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

Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?                        Cesar Chavez

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

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. Isaac Newton

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too. Lemony Snicket

The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. Northrop Frye

Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching. From a translation of an inscription on an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 B.C.E

The point is that rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter. Alan Watts

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own. William Empson

Men shout to avoid listening to one another. Miguel de Unamuno

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