Abiding principles do not mark the path that we take; they mark the boundaries we will not cross.   -Mark

We owe our elders nothing!
All that they do for us
is by way of favor only.
For it is only by means of conscience
that a favor becomes a debt.   -Mark

Younger people are still laboring under the illusion that they can accomplish everything if they just move fast enough.    -Mark

The second most important lesson we have to learn is discretion.   --Mark

Why settle for being credible when you can be incredible.   -Mark

When your aspirations meet your limitations, the one you embrace defines you.   -Mark

Opportunity is often missed because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.   -Thomas Edison

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.-Ayn Rand

When you are ready to listen to the universe, wherever you are will do just fine.    -Mark

I have values that will not be marginalized by your inability to measure them. -Mark

We must be keenly sensitive to the fact that not everything we say is inspired.     -Mark

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good" - Unknown. (special thanks to my son Daniel for contributing this one)

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." -J.D.Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye

When you pray, be not as the hypocrites who love to pray standing in the temples and on the street corners, that they may be seen of other men. Verily, they shall have their reward. Matthew 6:5

To distance oneself, to feign objectivity, this, then, is the mark of the "civilized" person.-David Byrne, "The Bicycle Diaries" <\p>

From whom much has been given, much is expected.    -Luke 12:48

There's a difference between being crazy and being wrong- Steve Wunderlich

Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.    -William Shakespeare

Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind-John Le Carre

History is art, and we are all painters.   -Mark

"...the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate society." Robert Pirsig, "Lila"

Spin and be happy. If the truth is relative, then spin is inevitable. So why not put a positive spin on everything. -Mark

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use    -Galileo Galilei

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality-Ayn Rand

Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or to understand what he sees? William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

I don't need permission to be curious-Cris Lowgren

How you do anything is how you do everything. -Mark

Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.-Marshall Sahlins

Occasionally I am still accused of looking at life like a child. What a wonderful thing to be guilty of. -Mark

We look back in horror at the millions of Germans who knew more or less exactly what was happening in the death camps and wonder what kind of monsters those people were. In fifty years our grandchildren [if any survive] will look back at the BILLIONS of us who knowingly and wontonly laid the entire world to waste and wonder what kind of monsters WE were.... Daniel Quinn, "Providence"

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When we are quiet and alone, we fear that something will be whispered in our ears, and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in society." Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Schopenhauer as Educator'

"If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found." --Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Perhaps what we hold most in awe about Nature is its majestic indifference to humanity.-Mark

Not all who wander are lost.--J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: 1. Fellowship of the Ring

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."-- Francis Bacon

If YOU are not THE expert on you, you've got some work to do.-Tina

My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perpleity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible. William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.-Napoleon Bonaparte

Oh the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders make mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably towards great disasters- Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

Reincarnation and the afterlife are both products of the ego, which fundamentally and intrinsically cannot come to terms with the finality of death. It is the ego's job to make you the center of the universe, so how can it come to terms with the idea that you are so unimportant as to have no role in the universe after death?   -Mark