"A great quote will make people see problems that they had not realized even to exist. However, a great quote will not provide any kind of final answers, but just opens one's eyes to see the possible solutions."
Jaakko J. Wallenius in "Windows on Humanity " -blog(2012)
A great quote can be a tremendous source of wisdom and insight. However, this does require that the reader can concentrate on the quote itself, and not on who said it, what school of thought it does represent, or what others might have said on the subject.
One needs to be able to immerse oneself in a pure thought to understand it as a separate entity from its writer. All truly great thoughts can acquire a life of their own. The life of a quote can even be quite separate of the life and fate of its original creator.
The funny thing is that all too many people seem not to be able to look at thoughts itself. They seem to be stuck on who said it as if it would be the only thing that is important in a quote. However, it is often not even important who said this or that, when it was it said or was the person who said in a position of authority or not.
Sadly, many people discussing quotes seem very often to be able to discuss only the persons who uttered these ideas and not the ideas themselves. A simple fact is that even if I would come up with the wisest idea in the world, it would be largely ignored because it was me who uttered it. That just is the way it is, I know.
There is a major problem with false quotes and quotes that can give a wrong impression of the thinking of the writer in question. However, I have always presented only verified quotes in this blog and quotes that do really represent the core thinking of the writer.
Wrongly attributed and wrong quotes is an evil that can be combated. However, this battle can be won with diligence and hard work.
Most of all, I always only publish quotes in this blog that I love myself. I naturally end up publishing only quotes that fit in to my own world-view. However, this fact can just give a needed consistency to this kind of collection, I think. Then it is not a random collection of wise words anymore, but it can form the basis for one possible way of seeing how the human world works.
Other major problem with quotes naturally is that for some people there is always the horror of not knowing what the next sentence is. However, a good quote does not need pages of explanations, but it can work as a separate entity. A quote that does need a lot of explaining and context just is not a good quote at all.
(This piece was refurbished on 3rd of January, 2012)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaakko_Wallenius
"Jaakko Wallenius (b. 30.January 1958 Hämeenlinna) is a Finnish writer and journalist."
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