Daily Poem and Quotations

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Quotes for Today:
"Gosh, Van, do we have to go through this again?" Yes, Back to School Week is a tradition and just like real life and the current lives of younger readers: Summer ends and it's time to go back to school and meet a new set of teachers. If that's intimidating to you, just think what it's like for the Teachers, outnumbered at least thirty-to-one.

"Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building."
- A. (Angelo) Bartlett Giamatti, 1938 - 1989

"A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations."
- Patricia Neal

"An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child."
- Carl Jung, 1875 - 1961

"What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows."
- Paulo Coelho

"The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'"
- Maria Montessori, 1870 - 1952

"The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself."
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 - 1873

Thought of the Day:
"When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart."
--John Bunyan, English author (1628-1688)

Quote of the Day:
"In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the presses."
--Calvin Trillin, writer & humorist (b. 1935)

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"Success has a simple formula: do your best and people may like it."
--Sam Ewing, MLB player & sports psychologist (b. 1949)

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Poem of the Day
"Goddess of Maple at Evening" by Chard deNiord

She breathed a chill that slowed the sap
inside the phloem, stood perfectly still
inside the dark, then walked to a field
where the distance crooned in a small
blue voice how close it is, how the gravity
of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch.
She sang along until the silence soloed
in a northern wind, then headed back
to the sugar stand and drank from a maple
to thin her blood with the spirit of sap.
To quicken its pace to the speed of sound
then hear it boom inside her heart.
To quicken her mind to the speed of light
with another suck from the flooded tap.

Bonus Poem:
"Frog" by Chard deNiord

My tongue leapt out of my mouth
when I lied to her and hopped away
to the stream below the house.
Mute then, I started to write the truth.
My tongue turned wild in the stream,
for which I was glad and unashamed.
I listen now from my porch to the complex things
it says in the distance about my heart.
How hard it is to tell the truth inside my mouth.
How much it needs to sing in the dark.

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Quotes for Today:

Robert Maynard Pirsig was born at Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1928. With an IQ of 170 at age nine he skipped several grades and entered the University of Minnesota at age 15. He left school to serve with the US Army in South Korea, earning his BA in 1950. He studied philosophy and journalism at Banaras Hindu University in India, at the University of Chicago, became a professor at Montana State University in 1958, and had a nervous breakdown after two years. He was in and out of hospital for three years, then took a motorcycle vacation with his son, traveling from Minnesota to California. Planning to write an essay on motorcycling he ended up with 800,000 words of philosophy, a volume that was rejected by 121 editors before being edited to become Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

QUOTES:

"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster."

"To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."

"When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."

"Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not."

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind."

"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite."

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."

All from Robert M. Pirsig

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Poem of the Day
"Work Without Hope" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Complete Poems [Penguin Classics]

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Bonus Poem
"Answer to a Child's Question" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, "I love and I love!"
In the winter they're silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
"I love my Love, and my Love loves me!"

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Poem of the Day:
"Discordants (Dead Cleopatra lies in a crystal casket) by Conrad Aiken in Selected Poems [Oxford University Press]

IV

Dead Cleopatra lies in a crystal casket,
Wrapped and spiced by the cunningest of hands.
Around her neck they have put a golden necklace,
Her tatbebs, it is said, are worn with sands.

Dead Cleopatra was once revered in Egypt—
Warm-eyed she was, this princess of the south.
Now she is very old and dry and faded,
With black bitumen they have sealed up her mouth.

Grave-robbers pulled the gold rings from her fingers,
Despite the holy symbols across her breast;
They scared the bats that quietly whirled above her.
Poor lady! she would have been long since at rest

If she had not been wrapped and spiced so shrewdly,
Preserved, obscene, to mock black flights of years.
What would her lover have said, had he foreseen it?
Had he been moved to ecstasy, or tears?

O sweet clean earth from whom the green blade cometh!—
When we are dead, my best-beloved and I,
Close well above us that we may rest forever,
Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.

Bonus Poem:
"After Reading 'Antony and Cleopatra'" by Robert Louis Stevenson

As when the hunt by holt and field
Drives on with horn and strife,
Hunger of hopeless things pursues
Our spirits throughout life.

The sea's roar fills us aching full
Of objectless desire—
The sea's roar, and the white moon-shine,
And the reddening of the fire.

Who talks to me of reason now?
It would be more delight
To have died in Cleopatra's arms
Than be alive to-night.

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Quotes for Today:
Richard Plantagenet was born at Oxfordshire, England on Sept 8thy in 1157. His mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine and his father Henry II of England. Although he eventually became King Richard I of England, he didn't much care for the job, didn't speak the language, and spent almost none of his life in England - despite the Robin Hood and Ivanhoe stories. As a young soldier his French subjects called him "Coeur de Lion" - we call him Richard the Lionhearted. Here are some quotes on Lions. There are, as far as I know, no quotes by Richard.
QUOTES:
Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
- Alfred Victor Vigny, 1797 - 1863

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
- Robert A. Heinlein, 1907 - 1988

An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.
- Walter Winchell, 1897 - 1972

An army of stags led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a stag.
- Chabrias, ca 410 - 357 BCE

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.
- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469 - 1527

There may come a time when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, but I am still betting on the lion.
- Josh Billings, 1818 - 1885



Thought of the Day:
"Beauty I have learned from the ugly, charity from the unkind, and peace from the turmoil of the world."
--Frederick Ward Kates, rector, Old St Paul's Church, Baltimore, Md.

Quote of the Day:
"Even in America, the Indian summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad...but never hustled."
--Henry Adams, historian & novelist (1838-1918)

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
--Voltaire, French philosopher (1694-1778)

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Poem of the Day
"Patience" by Kay Ryan

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

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Poem of the Day
[Untitled] by J. Michael Martinez

Imagine—in front of us—they silently pass. And they believe unrelated
objects are machines
for recognizing the human. And, again, we are no longer interruptions.

Imagine—in front of us—the beginning is not a study. And they believe
the cicada's larva
reveals narrow secrets. And we accompany: to form, to shape.

Imagine—in front of us—a beautiful garden. And they believe color is the
shoreline's end
where we abandon our too sudden bodies. And, here, we are carriers of
different significance.

Imagine—in front of us—each word devolves a lexicon. And they believe
shape shuts on a hinge
within the voice they fable. And, here, we slaughter the spring lambs.

Imagine—in front of us—they pass us between nature, between history.
And they believe the door
frame alters the curtains' flow. And we are a dark summer moving against
oceans.

Imagine starlings circling in a postcard's blue. And they believe oration is
the living thing, the end
of geometric space. And here, in full sunlight, we are gifts hoisted to the
vanishing point.

[pegasus]

Quotes for Today:
Cyril Vernon Connolly was born at Coventry, Warwickshire, England on Sept. 10th in 1903. His youth was divided between South Africa with his father, a British army officer, Dublin with his mother's family, and England with his paternal grandparents. He was educated at St Cyprian's, Eton, and Balliol College at Oxford. He was secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith who introduced him to the world of British literature. He went on to write short stories and essays for magazines and, in 1939, cofounded the literary magazine Horizon, which he edited for ten years.
QUOTES:
"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others."

"Our memories are card indexes — consulted and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control."

"When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow more loyal to situations and to types."

"In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?"

"The secret of happiness (and therefore of success) is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm, always lucid . . . to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore."

"Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm."
All from Cyril Connolly, 1903 - 1974

Thought of the Day:
"The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of other; it is in yourself alone."
--Orison Swett Marden, founder of Success magazine (1850-1924)

Quote of the Day:
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."
--Mark Twain, author (1835-1910)

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"To oppose something is to maintain it."
--Ursala K. LeGuin, sci-fi writer & poet (b. 1929)

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Quotes of the Day:
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on the Yasnaya Polyana estate near Tula, Russia on Sept. 9th in 1828. Raised by other family members after his parents died, his school teachers found him "both unable and unwilling to learn". He devoted himself to women, drinking, and gambling until his brother suggested he join the army. Action in the Crimean and witnessing an execution at Paris led him to an intense pacifist Christianity, his works influenced Mohandas Gandhi.
QUOTES:
"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation."

"I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it."

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."

"Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here."

History would be a wonderful thing — if it were only true.
All from Leo Tolstoy, 1828 - 1910


Thought of the Day:
"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."
— Thornton Wilder, American playwright (1897-1975).

Quote of the Day:
"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
--Plato, Classical Greek philosopher (429–347 B.C.E.)

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
--H.L. Mencken, ssocial critic & journalist (1880-1956)

Poem of the Day
"Back in Seaside" by Shana Compion

Rain interchangeable with
the walls it falls against
alphabetless like a neon
ring above an extincted
window showcasing something
formerly fabulous now
kinda poignantly disappeared.
I guess that means we're back
in Seaside (since we must
begin somewhere) and it's
probably summer but
can't be as long ago
as the date you suggest
since I wouldn't have been
born, or quietly gagging
at the sentence re: photographs
being "fairly far removed" from
sculpture anyway belied by
a euthanized block
of period tract housing
the loading dock's pair
of refrigerated trucks
the guileless curbs below
the blandishing panes
of all those plate windows
the corrugated doors
rolled shut against a
statement the curves
of the cars as they
throw back their throats
to the light the furtive
things people do in the night
(or don't do) bluely
compiled screen by screen
in perfervid surveillance
I just want to say yes
to you, yes and
watch this.

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Quotes of the Day:
Judith Sylvia Perlman was born at Washington City on Sept 13th in 1938. She grew up there and in various foreign capitals, her father was an economist with the United Nations. She graduated from Wellesly College, and went to work for the Washington Post. She started as a reporter, then became a theatre and movie critic, and after becoming Judith Martin was a founding member of the Post's Style section. In 1978 she started taking questions from readers on the subject of etiquette under the byline Miss Manners, responding with elegance, wit, and a no tolerance for nonsense.
QUOTES:
"The invention of the teenager was a mistake, in Miss Manners' opinion.... Once you identify a period of life in which people have few restrictions and, at the same time, few responsibilities - they get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, nobody wants to live any other way."

"Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution."

"If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached."

"It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help."

"When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed."

"Traditionally, a luncheon is a lunch that takes an eon."
All from Judith Martin

Thought of the Day:
"'Be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give to some people."
— J.B. Priestley, British novelist (1894-1984).

Quote of the Day:
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
--Miss Piggy.

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves."
J.M. Barrie, Scottish writer & creator of Peter Pan (1860-1937)


Poem of the Day
"When the Lamp is Shattred" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

II
As music and splendor
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute:—
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.

III
When hearts have once mingled
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

IV
Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.


Bonus Poems:
"Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

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Poem of the Day
"After Baby After Baby" by Rachel Zucker

When we made love you had
the dense body of a Doberman
and the square head of a Rottweiler.

With my eyes closed I saw:
a light green plate with seared scallops
and a perfect fillet of salmon on a cedar plank.

Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday
wanting to tell you how the world
is full of street signs and strollers
and pregnant women in spandex.

The bed and desk both want me.
The windows, the view, the idea of Paris.

With my minutes, I chip away at the idiom,
an unmarked pebble in a fast current. Later,
on my way to the store, a boy with a basketball
yells, You scared? to someone else, and the things
on the list to buy come home with me.
And the baby. And your body.

Bonus Poem:
"Diary [Surface]"

Spring is not so very promising as it is the thing
that looking back was fire, promising:
ignition, aspiration; it was not under my thumb.

Now when I pretend a future it is the moment
he holds the thing I say new-born,
delicate, sure to begin moving but

I am burned out of it like the melody underneath
(still not under my thumb)--
was he ambiguous, amphibian?

Underneath, his voice, the many ways
he gathers oxygen; it will not stop raining
until the buds push through the brittle trees.

If they fail we will not survive,
washed and washed with rain, will we?
No,we are not there yet.

She is pushing me two ways until
I am inside the paradox, the many lungs,
and they're at it again, gathering oxygen;

no wonder I am wrung out
holding out for the promise of
something secret, after--

[pegasus]

Quotes for Today:
This day, Sept 14, 1752, was a bit odd in England and all her colonies. It was a Thursday. The day before had been a Wednesday, but the date had been 2 September - 11 days had vanished. There were riots as those who missed the chance to work those days realized they had to pay their landlords a full month's rent. And that wasn't the only problem with 1752. As always, the new year had started on 25 March, but the year would end on 31 December. Twenty percent of the days in the year vanished in changes to the calendar. If there's a point here, I think it's that we need to attend to each day for itself, lest the months and years be disappointing.
QUOTES:
"There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination."
- Laurence Durrell, English writer (1912-1990)

"The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed."
- Sabastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort (1741-1794)

"Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others."
- Winston Churchill, British statesman (1874-1965)

"There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I."
- John Steinbeck, Nobel-winning novelist (1902-1968)

"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way."
- Ernest Hemingway, Nobel-winning author (1899-1961)

"Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day."
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Thought of the Day:
""What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print."
— Isadora Duncan, dancer (1877-1927).

Quote of the Day:
"The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself."
--John Ciardi, author (1916-1986)

sl.glitter-graphics.net/pub/1056/1056048gfr2ahr4mi.gif [/img]Quote of the Moment:
"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."
-- Karl Wallenda, high-wire artist (1905-1978)

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Quotes for Today:
François, duc de La Rochefoucauld was born at Paris on Sept. 15th in 1613. From a noble family, he was destined to make an impact and was trained in Latin, mathematics, fencing, dancing, heraldry, and etiquette. He was in command of a regiment at age fifteen. He took issue with certain powerful persons, specifically Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, which meant he was banished on several occasions and made his home in the Bastille briefly. Later in life he joined a salon in which the goal was to carefully hone observations on human character in one sentence. He turned out to be both prolific and skilled in this, endearing him to quotation collectors ever since.
QUOTES:
"Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool; - and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable."

"Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed."

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

"It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills."

"It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit."

"Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear."

"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them."
All from François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 1613 - 1680


Thought of the Day:
""You cannot survive if you do not know the past."
— Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist (1929-2006).

Quote of the Day:
"Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time."
--Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House (1882-1961)

Quote of the Moment:
"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer (1749-1832)


Poem of the Day
"Into Bad Weather Bounding" by Bin Ramke

(After Wallace Stevens' "Of The Surface Of Things")

Colligated points, dust, ultimately a cloud, as in
an orographic cloud in Colorado cringing against
a horizon. Boundaried vision and vapor conspire

to exhale, exalt into rain random dispersal into
the present: I see as far as that. I never saw farther.

In sinking air, mammatus cloud a sign the storm
has passed is passing... I walk happily whenever
or sometimes pass the last bad sign the bounded

land, I am sad as you are doubtless. Sad said
the bad man, somber. Otherwise say:
In my room the world is beyond
my understanding;/ But when I walk I see
that it consists of three or four hills
and a cloud.

Bonus Poem:
"A Line-storm Song" by Robert Frost

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

[pegasus]

Quotes for Today

Albert von Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt was born at Budapest, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on Sept. 16th in 1893. A fourth-generation scientist, he had difficulty in school, attending quite a few for short periods and finally, getting bored in 1914, he left to serve as an army medic. Disgusted with war, he shot himself in the arm and was sent home on medical leave, spending the rest of the war in his uncle's lab. He worked productively on a range of molecular reactions in the body, he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1937 for identifying the role of Vitamin C in the body. (A good Hungarian, he extracted the vitamin from paprika rather than from citrus fruits.) He was active in the Hungarian resistance, was considered a likely prospect to become president of Hungary after WW II, then came to the US and studied muscles at the molecular level and researched cancer in the same way.
QUOTES:
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind."

"Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend."

"Life is water, dancing to the tune of macro molecules."

"Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money."

"The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take."

"Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
All from Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)


Thought of the Day:
"'As a matter of fact' is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't."
— Laurence J. Peter, Canadian writer (1919-1990)

Quote of the Day:
"Freedom of the press is limited to those wh own one."
--A.J. Liebling, New Yorker writer (1904-1963)

Quote of the Moment:
"Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived."
--Helen Keller, author (1880-1968)

Poem of the Day

"Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
In the 5th century B.C.
an Indian philosopher
Gautama teaches "All is emptiness"
and "There is no self."
In the 20th century A.D.
Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man
with such a belly could pose,
smiling, and without a shirt.

Bonus Poem:
"Found Poem" by Howard Nemerov

(after information received in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 v 86)

The population center of the USA
Has shifted to Potosi, in Missouri.

The calculation employed by authorities
In arriving at this dislocation assumes

That the country is a geometric plane,
Perfectly flat, and that every citizen,

Including those in Alaska and Hawaii
And the District of Columbia, weighs the same;

So that, given these simple presuppositions,
The entire bulk and spread of all the people

Should theoretically balance on the point
Of a needle under Potosi in Missouri

Where no one is residing nowadays
But the watchman over an abandoned mine

Whence the company got the lead out and left.
"It gets pretty lonely here," he says, "at night."