Oscar W. Firkins quotes

The strictly logical mind is usually if not always at fault in its valuations of that defiantly illogical thing known as human nature.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#Nature #Mind #Faults

All men love peace in their armchairs after dinner; but they disbelieve the other nations's professions, rightly measuring its sincerity by their own.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#Peace #Men #Dinner

The touch of reality is salvation for the man who smothers amid forms and shadows. A blind man would rejoice in sight though his eyes opened on the carnage of a battlefield.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#Eye #Reality #Men

If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience, it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#Views #May #Needs

Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#Humor #Greatness #Serious

Humour is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought - rather it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy.
-- Oscar W. Firkins

#World #Serious #Economy

Coy Nature, (which remain'd, though aged grown, A beauteous virgin still, enjoy'd by none, Nor seen unveil'd by anyone), When Harvey's violent passion she did see, Began to tremble and to flee; Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree: There Daphne's Lover stopped, and thought it much The very leaves of her to touch: But Harvey, our Apollo, stopp'd not so; Into the Bark and Root he after her did go!

Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel they will be taken advantage of or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.

Beauty and inspiration can be found in any natural place of the earth.

We cannot teach a flower how to grow, we can only learn from it.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

Complaining is finding faults, wisdom is finding solutions

Avoid Extremes; and shun the fault of such Who still are pleas'd too little or too much.

Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.