DAILY CHOICE: Monday, February 8, 2010

Engaged vs. Disengaged

REFLECTION:

Once committed, fortune follows. Ignorance is a convenient excuse for disengagement. To not care is to lack magic and power. To wait for others to intervene is simply to admit one’s powerlessness, to admit that one is without life – lifeless. It is more about the living and less about the wondering what might have been. The world is a dangerous place. So what? Now what? Never be neutral. Stand for something. Those who “couldn’t care less” force each of us to care more. Worse than evil – indifference to evil. Emerge, embrace, embody a belief and you will cease to be afraid. It is okay to be wrong, as long as you think and feel each day. Be not a cold and timid soul. Be biased toward pursuit.

MUSES:

There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that never otherwise would have occurred…
Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can do,
Begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.

Goethe

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another, and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?
Henry James

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.
Katherine Hepburn

The world is a dangerous place to live – not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
Albert Einstein

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Dante

The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats the neighbor as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbor into an it, a thing. This is why we may say that there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, ‘I couldn’t care less.’
Joseph Fletcher

Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.
Lady Bird Johnson

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of the deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt

The crowning blessing of life- to be born with a bias to some pursuit.
S. S. Tallentyre