"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as "moral indignation," which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."
--Erich Fromm, Man For Himsel

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
--Walt Whitman, poet (1819-1892)

"I remember the day I caught my first, and last, fish. I was in college. During the winter break, a friend invited me to visit him. With makeshift fishing rods in our hands we went to the dam near his house. I sat there uneasily, holding the rod with the line dipped in the still water of the reservoir. A while later there was a tug and I promptly handed over the
rod to my friend. He pulled the line in. There was a small orange fish
on the end. It was alive, wildly flailing at its sudden change of fortune.
With a promise of food I had tricked it out of its life.

More than a decade has passed since then. Today I live next to a small lake. While strolling around the water I often come across someone sitting
there with a fishing rod extended over the lake. I softly say "Good luck!" in his general direction. He thanks me. I tell him I was saying that to
the fish. He smiles at the apparent joke... But I wasn't joking."
--Anu Garg

"What is art? Nature concentrated."
--Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
--Greek proverb

In one of the classes I took many years ago, my professor said that the state of the Earth would be in much better shape if humans lived a lot longer, so that we were forced to think more of the consequences of our actions; or if humans lived much shorter lives, so that we didn't live long enough to do too much damage in our lifetime. Unfortunately, we live long enough to plan and achieve acts of great destruction and short enough that some of us don't care what happens afterwards because they won't be around to suffer through it.