My quotation, poem and fortune cookie wisdom collection

Scattered around my room, on my bulletin board and my hall way are collections of sayings and quotes that I’ve picked up over the years. Each of them have inspired me (even if momentarily like the fortune cookies), meant something to me at a particular moment in life, hold a memory or even represent an ideal of sorts.

The fortune cookies I’ve collected for a long time, but the quotes I remember the specific moment I started collecting them. Back when my sister was in high school the furnace closet was in the hallway right out side the doors to our rooms. One day she put up some type of quote, maybe it was from Maya Angelou and I had a feeling she picked it up from school. Now if you’ve been in a Hallmark store lately they have a whole series of cards with her poetry. Its decently poetic, much more substantive than the usual greeting card fluff you’ll find out there and a little bit on the conscious and empowering tip. Well, this quote my sister put up was something along these lines. I didn’t think it was bad, but it just wasn’t the type of stuff I wanted to wake up and be the first thing I read as walked to the bathroom in the morning. So decided to put up a competing set of quotes right next to it. I think it first started with Mao’s pear quote, Gramsci’s maxim and Nietzsche one on the abyss that Mumia prefaces his history on the Black Panther’s with. It began as one page, but has grown to a closet wall of cut outs. -AW

 

Revolution is a “resistance movement agsinst the destruction of love in social reality.“

-Pual Tillich, as quoted by Eric Fromm in “Marx’s Conception of Socialism”

Men [and women] are the producers of their conceptions [and] ideas. … In direct contract to German philosophy which ascends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.

 -Karl Marx, The German Ideology 

As long as there is in our land a heart with pain or an eye full of years, my dream and my vision will have to survive.

 

-Ricardo Flores Magón

The more I raise my eyes to it, the higher it seems; the more I bore into it, the harder it becomes. I see it before me, but suddenly it is behind me. … even if I wanted to stop, I could not do so. Having exhausted me ability, I still seem to find something standing high above. Though I wish to follow it, there is no way to do so.

 –The Analects of Confucius, Book nine, verse eleven