Tag Archives: quotes
Life goals
How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
-John Burroughs
I love this quote. It’s inspirational. Of course, the wonderful part of it is that none of us really know when our last days will be… so we should probably try and make sure all of our days are full of light and color, don’t you think?
Sunday Quotes: What Comes Next Is Up To Us.
Princes & Kings
Isn’t it strange how princes and kings,and clowns that caper in sawdust rings,
and common people, like you and me,
are builders for eternity?
Each is given a list of rules;
a shapeless mass; a bag of tools.
And each must fashion, ere life is flown,
A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone.
-R. Lee Sharpe
This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.
-Haile Selassie
Quotes: Compassion
These seem pretty relevant to our current political and social discussions… And to life in general…
I truly believe that compassion provides the basis of human survival. – Dalai Lama
Compassion:
sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men. – Confucius
I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honourable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. – Leo C. Rosten
The world must never again confuse compassion for weakness. – Steve Rogers, Captain America
Why are you here?
I like this thought from Dan Pearce – 
What’s the point? What’s the reason? To help my kids have a good life? To help my wife do the same? To make theatre and help people laugh, or cry, or reflect on their life and feel not alone? To enjoy life and try to be a force for positivity? I feel like these are the things I’m supposed to be doing… but too often I find myself NOT doing them. Too often I get caught up in my own ego, or fears, or the negativity of someone else, or my own laziness. or distract-ability (is that a word? Go with it.) Lately I’ve been lucky – it’s been easy to come to work and celebrate that I get to run a regional theatre, and I’ve had some wonderful QFT (Quality Family Time!) to remind me what’s important, to keep me focused.
Still, this last month has been an interesting one – the Facebook features “Memories” and “Timehop” have brought up LOTS of the “Team Tony” photos because it was 2 years ago now that I was waking up from a coma, and a lot of people were getting their t-shirts and posting them. Seeing all the flashback-posts is wonderful, and heart-warming, and also a little emotional because of all that went on, and all that is still going on. They also help remind me how lucky my family is to have had all that support, and that this life is pretty fleeting, and we have just one chance to make the most of it… hence the Dan Pearce quote! Of course, thinking back to all of that, and of how lucky I am to be here today, AND of the quote above, it makes me wonder if those things are enough… what else can I be doing? What else SHOULD I be doing? I guess I have more questioning to do, as Dan Pearce suggests. 🙂
Oh – also, because of those Facebook features, I’m finding a bunch of photos I never saw before! I’ve added a bunch of new pics to the Team Tony page on my site, and done a few other tweaks to the site. Check it out, let me know what you think!
And today – take a minute to look around and count some blessings.
THINK!
Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. -Plato
“Don’t make me think for myself! Don’t make me feel something! Tell me WHAT to think! Tell me WHAT to feel! Don’t make me ask QUESTIONS and explore the answer!”
Sad. I get sad when this is the response to things. Especially things I’ve made, or that other storyteller friends have made. Sad, and frustrated. In today’s world, the ability – or interest? – in THINKING and exploring something seems to be fading away. So many people seem to be looking to get the easy answer: “Tell me how to feel!”
Listen, I love a nice, simple, clear-as-day episode of Matlock as much as anybody… I’ll happily sit and laugh my way through an episode of Three’s Company… but not everything should be that simple. Not everything CAN be that simple. They’ll yell – the people who shun imagination and critical thinking, they’ll complain – but we can’t give in, those of us who are artists and storytellers, we can’t give in and allow everything to be dumbed down and oversimplified. There is room for all sorts of storytelling – and we can’t allow the people who want every moment of life to be spelled out in snack-sized sound bites to take away our ability to SAVOR NOT KNOWING. To revel in asking the question. To go home at the end of the night NOT having everything laid out in a mindlessly digestible form, but having some things left unanswered rattling around in our brains, forcing us to analyze them using our imagination, our own sense of curiosity and wonder, our own life experience. It’s from THIS that we understand our life, and the world around us: From the sharing of moments and ideas, and reflecting on them, discussing them. NOT from having ideas explained and answers handed to us, but having ideas presented and the questions asked!
One way teaches us to be thinkers. The other teaches us to be nothing but consumers.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
-Hannah Arendt
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
— Douglas Coupland
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
— Brandon Sanderson
Thoughts For Today
A couple quotes I read today that really hit home.
Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise. -Pope Francis
Life Should Be For Everyone
“Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.”
-E.H. Chapin
“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
-Goethe
“Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.”
-Anna Quindlen
“Eastward and westward storms are breaking,–great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.”
-W.E.B. DuBois
What if…
I Like This
In the Russian tradition of Stanislavsky, the actor says “I will tell you a story about me.” In the German tradition of Brecht, the actor says, “I will tell you a story about them.” In the Vietnamese tradition, the actor says “You and I will tell each other a story about all of us.”
– “In Vietnam, Telling Stories About ‘All of Us,'”
Ron Jenkins, New York Times, August 11, 2002
Tony Caselli 