Saturday Quotathon: Sloth and Apathy

As a reminder that I need to be more active (if not do more work - I do plenty of that), today's subject is laziness and, since it too frequently goes with it, apathy. Too often, we find excuses for not doing what we know we ought to be doing. And that goes for me, too.

Elizabeth: There will come a moment when you have a chance to do the right thing.
Jack: I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.
-From Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
-William Saroyan

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
-Abraham Lincoln

Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
- Aristotle

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.
- Molière

The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.
- Piet Hein

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
- Mohandas Gandhi

May all your troubles last as long as you New Year’s resolutions.
-Joey Adams

The time is always right to do what is right.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now—always.
-Albert Schweitzer

"Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, Why me?" And the voice says, "Nothing personal your name just happened to come up."
-Charles M. Schulz

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do -- nothing else.
-Mahatma Ghandi

I judge a man by his actions with men, much more than by his declarations Godwards. When I find him to be envious, carping, spiteful, hating the successes of others, and complaining that the world has never done enough for him, I am apt to doubt whether his humility before God will atone for his want of manliness.
- Anthony Trollope

To believe in something, and not live it, is dishonest.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Everyone wants to be strong and self sufficient, but nobody is willing to put in the work necessary to achieve these goals
-Mahatma Gandhi

WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it.
-Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.
--George Patton

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But... the good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

The greatest sin of our time is not the few who have destroyed but the vast majority who sat idly by.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions.
--Werner von Braun

Today's Fortune Cookie:
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
-- Henry Miller

True love isn't so much a dreamy feeling that you have as it is an enduring commitment to give sacrificially - even, or perhaps especially, when you don't feel like it.
- William R. Mattox, Jr

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
- Herbert Clark Hoover, 1874 – 1964

"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all."
-Leo Rosten

Whew, must stop there. If I seemed heavy on the Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Gandhi, bear in mind they were individuals who knew better than many the risks of apathy.