Every crowd has a silver lining

Every crowd has a silver lining.

— Phineas Taylor Barnum

Similar Posts

  • Live Life’s Questions

    I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

    Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

    Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  • A Few Good Men

    Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.

    We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick a weapon and stand a post.

    — Aaron Sorkin, monologue by Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men.

    No apologies. This quote is simply a guilty pleasure.

  • What is a Poet?

    What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. . . . And men crowd about the poet and say to him, “Sing for us again;” that is as much to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; for the cries would only frighten us but the music is delicious.”

    Søren Kierkegaard

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