T

TALE

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

TALK

Deep-bottomed boats travel slowly.

Talk is primarily a way of killing time. Perhaps that explains its popularity.

Mankind divides itself into two types: dialogue people and monologue people. The latter never hear you or your side since they are pauseless monologists.

A peasant may be more interesting than a scholar if the peasant opens his soul and the scholar only an odd book.

Though you don’t hear the fish, it doesn’t mean they are not talking.

Some talk of a thousand different things and still speak only about themselves.

TASTE

Is the feeler of man’s appetite and still the best judge of right nutrition.

Taste is spoiled in childhood by parental prejudice and in adults by customs and fads.

TEARS

Come readily from shallow souls.

Blessed the tears shed for the brother’s woe and the smile over the neighbor’s happiness!

TELEOLOGY

If man is nature’s ultimate goal then this is an awfully small world.

Man is as little the final purpose of divine providence as an elk or a beetle or a salamander.

Teleology in its attempt to find a man-suiting purpose in nature will have to contend with the teleology of plants, animals and perhaps other entities.

Were the sunflowers placed in the meadow as supply source for the bees; or as food for some parasites; or for man to look at; or to drop to the ground and serve as fertilizer for surrounding weeds?

What a tragicomic pose! Tiny man no bigger than a mold traveling on a gigantic rock through billions of years and miles in an unfathomed galaxy of innumerable worlds, yet hollering at the top of his inaudible voice: Hear me, trillions of universes, aeons of times, infinities of space! I, man, earthbound fungus, 98 per cent water, 2 per cent phosphor and such, I am the aim and end of it all. I am the purpose of all this majestic movement in its mysterious history!

Perhaps the Torah was right in forbidding man to set himself in stone or paint, lest he feel himself lasting or even everlasting. Is he more than a pinch of dust with a whisper of breath?

If there be purpose to this world in its crazy meandering, it can’t be a good one. By all human reckoning there is more sin harvested in a day than goodness planted in a year.

TEMPER

Let your thoughts be burning, but your words cool.

Watch your voice and you need not watch your words.

TEMPTATION

The Devil just testing.

It is easy to resist the big ones; the little ones cause havoc.

THEODICY

Not all is good and beautiful in this world, but then neither are we.

We find a spider web glistening in the morning dew enchantingly aesthetic—yet it is only the shroud of a still-kicking victim. The nightingale breaks into a delightful cadence of song whenever her golden throat swallows the crushed worm; and who has not admired the picture of leonine majesty resting satiated in the bush, a limp half-eaten doe under his mighty paw. The world seems ordained to mutual destruction in a chain of necessities.

THINKING

Thought is a twig on the tree of emotion and instinct. As it was a million years ago, the first is still an outgrowth of the latter.

Men think quite alike; if it were different, they could not coexist even for a day. But most people judge by traditional or imitated judgment patterns, and snap judgments are the rule and the rulers.

Is thinking ever free? Wherever I meet it, I find it chained to a motive of one kind or another. The world operates on motivated thinking tied to prejudice, opportunism, greed, narrow-mindedness, selfishness, and a thousand other little passions and passionettes that clutter up the narrow path of righteousness.

Thinking can be shaped by heart, gall, glands, stomach, or even shifting eyes. Sometimes I wish that people’s thoughts came in colors so one could see what part of the body sent them forth.

Thinking may be classified on a color chart, however, of poetic imagination. Some people’s cogitations run rosy; others gray, even black. There are those who think yellow and those who live and breathe blood red. The minds of others are of peculiar color combinations. And there are sages whose badge is white, embodying all the colors. No human emotion is strange to them, yet none colors their thoughts.

A good thought, even when poorly presented, will finally emerge right side up.

The last thought is always wiser than the first.

TIME

Time does not heal wounds, it just hides some and deepens others.

How quickly does today turn into yesterday.

Time took the wrong road. The Past was not all glory; there was wilderness. But now we are trapped in a Death Valley with no sight of a Tomorrow.

No one can plot the path of time; perhaps we have been standing on a byway for centuries, thinking our dead end was the summit of it all.

TIME AND SPACE

Live on borrowed existence: they are not really there, they just relate to each other.

TODAY

Is to be lived as if it were tomorrow, because tomorrow is only belated yesterday.

TOLERANCE

Must stop at the threshold of monstrosity.

Tolerance appears in two editions, one bound in wisdom and one in indifference.

Tolerance is ill used on friends of the great sinners. When the sinners fall, some of their friends plead the thin excuse of compulsion. The sycophants are always ready to serve the new master and renounce the old, but the Hebrews said you cannot be Abaddon, angel of the bottomless pit, and Gabriel in one person.

TOMBSTONE

Better study your epitaph now lest your tombstone belie its dead.

TOMORROW

If a tomorrow were never to come, it would not be worth living today.

TONGUE

The tongue is man’s best friend but also his worst enemy.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but mightier yet is the tongue. The tongue-waggers are the masters of our era, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Mussolinis. The swish of their tongues is deadlier than all weapons.

Buddhists attribute four evils to the tongue—slander, lying, idle talk and offensive speech—and only three to the rest of the body. By their words you shall judge them. Vicious tongues have incited to world-wide massacre and have ever so much prejudiced thinking among men and nations, races and creeds.

TORTURE

Nature is beset with suffering, but of all beasts, only man makes a business of prolonging it.

TOTALITARIANISM

This granite earth we live on could be a bed of roses were it not for the scheming Procrustes and his fellow henchmen, be their shirts black, brown or red.

The Red camarilla has taken the romance out of socialism and replaced it with opportunistic expediency, thus losing the best of the idea and acquiring the worst that is in imperialist government.

TRAINING

You cannot train a horse with shouts and expect it to obey a whisper.

TRAVEL

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

TREASON

Once a traitor, always a question mark.

THE TREE

Is the symbol of wisdom: it never shouts, and only whispers when it’s moved.

TRITE

We call the oft-repeated truism which we have accepted for the record but never for real—for example, Love thy neighbor.

TRUST

Is an expectation based more on the hopes of the person having it than on the nature of the one trusted. No one is so deceitful that he has not been trusted by some and sundry.

TRUTH

To judge truth by its expediency is like calculating the profits of love.

All men can savor truth, but it has to be served differently from one to another.

How come the sages of all times speak the same truth? The Hebrews revere Shalshelet Ha Cabbalah, the Chain of Tradition. There is a chain of tradition running from the days of Ur to our time, but familiarity with the so-oft-repeated pronouncements of the prophets has estranged us. Perhaps the sayings of our fathers should be translated into a foreign idiom and then brought back as a rare find, in order to be listened to again!

Man’s mind is confounded by the deceitful twins: hearsay and gainsay.

Truth drops its wings before a low-ceilinged mind.

Truth hurts only the liar.

Truth may not make you free but falsehood will enslave you.

People spend more time on camouflaging truth than in uncovering it.

TYRANNY

Is tyranny, no matter what banner is flown from the halberd.