Michael Fleegler > Michael's Quotes

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“A weed is a plant out of place.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
― Richard Shaull, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. ”
― Dave Eggers

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses”
― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems

“Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world's power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.”
― William Giraldi, Busy Monsters

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.”
― e. e. cummings