Greg Fischer's Personal Web Site

"Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having." -- D. H. Lawrence (A Modern Lover)

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -- African proverb

"Not all those who wander are lost" -- J.R.R. Tolkien

"You can put your shoes in the oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits." -- Unknown

"Poverty is the worst form of violence." -- Gandhi

"Wisdom begins in wonder." -- Socrates

"Anticipate charity by preventing poverty." -- Maimonides

"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." -- usually attributed to Mark Twain

"What you're doing now matters much more than what you've done. Otherwise, you're dead but you still have to take showers." -- Mel Sherer

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." -- Abraham Maslow

"Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." --Po Bronson

"[When you are choosing what to do with your life, choose wisely, for as the hammer pounds the anvil, so too does the anvil pound the hammer. In choosing what we will do, we are choosing who we will become]."--Robert Russell

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

"We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams." -- Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, I)

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -- Carl Sagan [I'm waiting for the Sagan vs. Chekov Battle Royale]

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty" -- Mahatma Ghandi

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love." -- Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." -- Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The fish will be the last to discover water." -- J. S. Bruner

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell." -- St. Augustine (De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37)

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ` Eureka !' (`I found it!') but rather `hmm.... that's funny...'" -- Isaac Asimov

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. " -- W. Somerset Maugham

"I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues. " -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Impropriety is the soul of wit." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Only a mediocre person is always at his best." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies." -- Gandhi

"In a gentle way, you can shake the world." -- Gandhi

"There is more to life than increasing its speed." -- Gandhi

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." -- Gandhi

"The unexamined life is not worth living." -- Socrates

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." -- Socrates

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them." -- Kahlil Gibran

"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give." -- Kahlil Gibran

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." -- Kahlil Gibran

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answers." -- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but it is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers...the mind can never break off from the journey." -- Pat Conroy

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally." -- Oscar Wilde

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." -- Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much." -- Oscar Wilde

"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to." -- Oscar Wilde

"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future." -- Oscar Wilde

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde

"I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability." -- Oscar Wilde

"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde

"No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly." -- Oscar Wilde

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards." -- Oscar Wilde

"There is no sin except stupidity." -- Oscar Wilde

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." -- Theodore Roosevelt