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September 13

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave. ~ William Drummond of Logiealmond
2005
Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets. ~ Judith Martin, widely known as "Miss Manners" (born 13 September 1938)
2006
What I need is a good defense
'Cause I'm feeling like a criminal
And I need to be redeemed
To the one I've sinned against
Because he's all I ever knew of love.
~ Fiona Apple ~ (born 13 September 1977)
2007
Worldly renown is naught but a breath of wind, which now comes this way and now comes that, and changes name because it changes quarter. ~ Dante Alighieri (died 13 or 14 September 1321)
2008
Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. ~ Roald Dahl
2009
By Jove the stranger and the poor are sent,
And what to those we give, to Jove is lent.
~ Alexander Pope,
in his interpretation of
The Odyssey by Homer
  • proposed by Kalki (in relation to the legendary date of the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill on the ides of September, 13 September 509 BC)
2010
Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. ~ Sherwood Anderson
2011
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
~ Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass ~
2012
The good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.
~ Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach ~
2013
You will have to know life … If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words … It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.
~ Sherwood Anderson ~
2014
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
~ Richard Feynman ~
2015
ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
~ Ambrose Bierce ~
2016
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form — to make it true and real to the theme, not to life. Often the better the job is done, the greater the confusion. … The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.
~ Sherwood Anderson ~
2017
"The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles."
~ Roald Dahl ~
2018
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
~ Sherwood Anderson ~
2019
I see the bad moon arising
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin'
I see bad times today.

Don't go around tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise.
~ John Fogerty ~
  • proposed by Kalki, in regard to the Friday the 13th full Harvest Moon of this year.
2020
The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free. They are free, Aegisthus. You know it, but they do not.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre ~
  • proposed by Kalki; in relation to the legendary date of the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill on the ides of September, 13 September 509 BC: Zeus/Jupiter speaking, in Sartre's play The Flies.
2021
You shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.
~ Fiona Apple ~
2022
Yesterday and today, the Russian army struck the Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians found themselves in the dark — without electricity. Houses, hospitals, schools, communal infrastructure … Russian missiles hit precisely those objects that have absolutely nothing to do with the infrastructure of the Armed Forces of our country.
On the one hand, this is a sign of the desperation of those who invented this war. This is how they react to the defeat of Russian troops in the Kharkiv region. They can't do anything to our heroes on the battlefield, and that's why Russia is directing its vile strikes against civilian infrastructure.
~ Volodymyr Zelenskyy ~
2023
The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer ~
2024
Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.
~ Jared Isaacman ~
  • proposed by Kalki; remarks at the start of the first civilian spacewalk,on the Polaris Dawn space mission.
2025
Rank or add further suggestions…

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1 : Acceptable – but with no particular desire to see it used.
0 : Not acceptable – not appropriate for use as a quote of the day.
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Suggestions

It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President, the country is so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number. ~ Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, RD was born this day.

Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason — you could reckon the ration as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions. ~ Desiderius Erasmus (The temple of Jupiter on Rome's Capitoline Hill is dedicated on the ides of September, 13 September 509 BC)

  • 3 Kalki 10:48, 10 September 2006 (UTC) briefly ranked this a 4 in 2009, but kept options open for any better quotes on Jupiter or the temple, which I eventually found.
  • 2 InvisibleSun 00:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Love, which absolves no beloved one from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thous seest, it does not leave me yet. ~ Dante Alighieri (died 13 or 14 September 1321)

  • 3 Kalki 10:48, 10 September 2006 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 00:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

A speech is entertaining only when serenely detached from all information. ~ Henry Fountain Ashurst (born September 13, 1874)

—This unsigned comment is by Allen3 (talk • contribs) .
  • 2 Kalki 00:06, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

To the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar. Graves at my command,
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth,
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd
Some heavenly music — which even now I do, —
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.
~ William Shakespeare in The Tempest ~

  • 3 Kalki 20:29, 12 September 2009 (UTC) in relation to the Temple of Jupiter.

Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

  • 3 Kalki 20:29, 12 September 2009 (UTC) in relation to the Temple of Jupiter.

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauties, orient deep
These flow'rs, as in their causes, steep.
~ Thomas Carew ~

  • 3 Kalki 20:29, 12 September 2009 (UTC) in relation to the Temple of Jupiter.

Where is the key that locked these gates of speech,
Once beautiful, where thought stood sentinel,
Where sweetness sat, where wisdom passed, to teach
Our weakness strength, our homage to compel?

Despoiled at last, and waste and barren lies
This once so rich domain. Where lives and moves,
In what new world, the splendor of these eyes
That dauntless lightened like imperial Jove's?
~ Celia Thaxter ~

  • 3 Kalki 00:20, 13 September 2009 (UTC) in relation to the Temple of Jupiter.

Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets. ~ Roald Dahl

A Message to Children Who Have Read This Book — When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY. ~ Roald Dahl

It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you. ~ Roald Dahl

"Dreams is very mystical things," the BFG said. "Human beans is not understanding them at all. Not even their brainiest prossefors is understanding them." ~ Roald Dahl

Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do. All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting. One of the things he NEVER NEVER was allowed to do, the most exiting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond. ~ Roald Dahl

Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night … You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses. ~ Sherwood Anderson


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