Some Favorite Quotes, Poems and Sayings
This is a collection of some of my favorite quotes, poems and sayings.
, The Value of Traveling Today
“There’s much talk these days about the cost to the environment of our insatiable urge to move around. My view is that until the aeroplane is dis-invented then we should continue to use it to learn more about our world. But you know my personal view by now. Simply flying to a resort which looks just like home and learning and absorbing nothing of the country you’re in IS a waste, not only of the world’s resources, but also your own brain. Please travel but use this precious privilege (available only to a tiny minority in the world) to try and understand, appreciate, value and enjoy how other people live. Only in this way can we who love travel, go some way to reducing the well of anger and resentment which motivates those few, but influential people, who don’t want us to get to know each other.”
Michael Palin, 2006
Disturb us, Lord
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push us in the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
Sir Francis Drake, 1577
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616)
