Jim Steen quotes

“My final coaching point of the day: It's my contention that in any given moment one lives one's life in one of two ways, either under a threat or for a challenge. In performing when it counts, it's one or the other, under a threat or for a challenge. If, as Einstein says, "Imagination will take you everywhere," then living your life under a threat will take you nowhere.”
-- Jim Steen

Source : Jim Steen's commencement address at Kenyon College, www.graduationwisdom.com. 2011.

#Inspirational Quotes #Graduation Quotes #Two Quotes

“When I cannot understand my Father's leading, And it seems to be but hard and cruel fate, Still I hear that gentle whisper ever pleading, God is working, God is faithful-Only wait.”

“Freedom is never given; it is won.”

Source : Keynote speech given at the Second National Negro Congress, 1937.

“Most people's major life changes don't come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.”

Source : "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz, www.aaronsw.com. October 20, 2006.

“Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.”

“A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.”

“Come, come, come. Without a monster or two it's not a quest, merely a gaggle of friends wandering about.”

“Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.”

Source : A. E. Hotchner (2010). “The Good Life According to Hemingway”, p.11, Harper Collins

“On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.”

“Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.”

Source : A. Whitney Brown (1991). “The Big Picture: An American Commentary”, Harper Perennial

“I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.”