My Life in Quotes: #149-#159
149. “I felt like a fraud. So I learned to fly an airplane. So I crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat. So I took a space shot to the moon. On the trip home I thought, “A fraud has circled the moon.” So I took a full page ad in the newspaper and confessed to the world that I was a fraud! I read the ad and I thought, “A fraud is pretending to be honest.””- Feiffer cartoon, 1978
I read this quote decades before I ever heard the term “imposter syndrome.” What I understand is that just about everyone feels it. It is challenging for me to focus on the good that I’ve done and all that I have accomplished, without, still, that inner voice harping on the times I haven’t lived up to the best in myself.
150. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”- Wittgenstein
God created the world with words and we create our world with words. I love words and I love these quotes, and what a gift when we can find the exact right word to describe a moment.
151. “Ilona interrupted. “David, that first night we talked- I told you then that we were two different species, despite our Jewishness. Why did you not listen? David, we have nothing in common. Nothing. Not even Goose Bay. You, I know, see in Goose Bay only waste and isolation, but to me Goose Bay is Heaven- because I have already learned what hell is. It is people. You, David, look at the world and see order and purpose and the handiwork of God. I look at the world and see chaos and madness and an officer crushing a cat’s tail for sport- still another Eichmann. I recognize a hopelessly fat neurotic, and you envision her transformed by a little kindness into a slim, healthy beauty.
I wish I had recorded where I read this. Clearly Ilona is a survivor, trying to explain the inexplicable- the evil she has witnessed and how it has transformed her. #152 below appears to come from the same text.
152. I spend the entire evening explaining why I cannot be your wife, and you hear me telling you why I shall marry you. as a rabbi you talk about love and peace and the Messianic hope and God, but I know only hatred and war and despair and- devils. You speak of- there is the difference between us- you speak and you feel and you believe and you hope and you pray. But I know, David. I wish that I did not, but I know!” She ground her eyes shut and tears spurted from them. “You pray, and you ask God to forgive you for your sins. But I never pray, David, because I can never forgive God for His sins.””- Herbert Tarr, The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen, p. 267
Per the above, Ilona’s experience is engraved in her soul. She can’t, or won’t allow herself, to move on and to embrace life.
153. “It is about time that we stopped talking of the failure of religion, education and civilization to improve man, and began to talk of the failure of man to improve religion, education and civilization.”- Mordecai Kaplan
Kaplan must have written this 60 years ago, yet its truth resonates. I think it goes both ways. The best of civilization and religion lifts us up, and, ideally, we continue to elevate our traditions as we grow and learn as humans.
154. “Her heart was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become Sir Pitt Crawley’s wife. Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair.”- William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
This novel reflects another era, when women’s choices were so very limited and marriages were arranged with no thought of love. Thankfully we have mostly moved beyond this need for women to subsume their feelings in order to survive.
155. “Who was the blundering idiot who said that ‘fine words butter no parsnips?’ Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.”- ibid., p. 226
Flattery will get you everywhere.
156. “Remorse is the least active of all a man’s moral senses- the very easiest to be deadened when wakened; and in some never wakened at all.”- ibid., p. 497
I’m not sure if this is true. Elsewhere in this collection is Emily Dickenson’s poem on remorse. Re-morse, to chew over and again. I’m sure there are psychopaths who never feel remorse, but for most of us, I think, the opposite is more the case- we can’t let go of our feelings of regret for choices made.
157. I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef?”- ibid., p. 584
I was a vegetarian for many years. Maybe even when I read this initially. It reminds me that “man does not live by bread alone.” We can wax philosophical all we want, but, then, it’s time for a good meal.
158. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”- Albert Einstein
Well- Einstein said it simply enough!
159. “If we can send one man to the moon, why not send them all?”- T-shirt ad, Ms. Magazine, July ’83
Not sure what precipitated this ad, but as the feminist movement was emerging it is easy to understand the thought behind it.
About This Series- About This Series- I love words. I love when a word exactly captures the moment, the feeling. How it precisely describes something that you experienced but didn’t know exactly how to express. It’s like a warm bath or a deeply satisfying meal.
And beyond that- a collection of words. A deeply insightful phrase, thought-provoking and uplifting. A quote to remember.
I started collecting quotes when I was 16 years old. (1972) I’m 70 now, as I write these words, (2026), and there are 473 quotes in my collection. At this precise moment.
That’s not really that many over the course of 54 years. I guess I am fairly discriminating. Sometimes years can go by and the collection lays dormant. In other years there is a great harvest of quotes.
These are not necessarily famous quotes, things you’ll often hear referenced. For the most part, they simply represent words that I read that made me stop for a moment to meditate and bask in their impact. And quotes I enjoy reading and re-reading and quoting myself!
These quotes represent the evolution of my thinking over the course of 54 years. I look forward to pondering what it is that made me find each one meaningful enough to save.