# February 2

Quotes of the day from previous years:

## 2004

    My years are not advancing as fast as you might think. ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" in Groundhog Day
   * selected by Kalki

## 2005

    Anything different is good. ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" in Groundhog Day
   * selected by Kalki

## 2006

    There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens. ~ Coretta Scott King (recent death)
   * selected by Kalki

## 2007

    Well, it's Groundhog Day... again... ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" in Groundhog Day
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2008

    History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. ~ James Joyce in Ulysses (Joyce born 2 February 1882)
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2009

    History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. ~ Abba Eban (born 2 February 1915)
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2010

    I'm not playing by their rules anymore! ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" in Groundhog Day
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2011

    When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. ~ James Joyce
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2012

    I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning. ~ James Joyce
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2013

* I'm a god — I'm not the God. I don't think.
* ~ "Phil" ~ in ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2014

* I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.
* ~ Ayn Rand ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2015

* On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
* ~ James Joyce ~ in ~ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ~
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2016

* There is something so familiar about this. Do you ever have déjà vu?
* ~ Andie MacDowell as "Rita" ~ in ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2017

* What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
* ~ Bill Murray ~ as "Phil" in ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2018

* All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
* ~ James Joyce ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2019

* When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.
* ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" ~ in ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2020

* Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
* ~ James Joyce ~ in ~ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ~
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2021

* You can't plan a day like today.
* ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2022

* I have loved my NFL career, and now it is time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention. I've done a lot of reflecting the past week and have asked myself difficult questions. And I am so proud of what we have achieved. My teammates, coaches, fellow competitors, and fans deserve 100% of me, but right now, it's best I leave the field of play to the next generation of dedicated and committed athletes.
* ~ Tom Brady ~
   * proposed by Kalki, in regard of his announcement of retirement from NFL football.

## 2023

* I like to see a man of advancing years throwing caution to the wind. It's inspiring in a way.
* ~ Groundhog Day ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2024

* When you find yourself needing the phrase "This is like Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.
* ~ Roger Ebert ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2025

* Groundhog Day, apart from everything else, is a demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break. Just because we're born as SOBs doesn't mean we have to live that way.
* ~ Roger Ebert ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2026

    Rank or add further suggestions…
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD:
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery. ~ James Joyce
   * used 16 June 2009, proposed by Kalki
* The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
* ~ James Joyce in Ulysses ~
   * used 16 June 2011, proposed by Kalki (talk · contributions)
The Quote of the Day (QOTD) is a prominent feature of the Wikiquote Main Page. Thank you for submitting, reviewing, and ranking suggestions!

   ## Ranking system

    4 : Excellent – should definitely be used. (This is the utmost ranking and should be used by any editor for only one quote at a time for each date.)
    3 : Very Good – strong desire to see it used.
    2 : Good – some desire to see it used.
    1 : Acceptable – but with no particular desire to see it used.
    0 : Not acceptable – not appropriate for use as a quote of the day.
    An averaging of the rankings provided to each suggestion produces it’s general ranking in considerations for selection of Quote of the Day. The selections made are usually chosen from the top ranked options existing on the page, but the provision of highly ranked late additions, especially in regard to special events (most commonly in regard to the deaths of famous people, or other major social or physical occurrences), always remain an option for final selections.
    Thank you for participating!

## Suggestions

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition. ~ Harold Rosenberg (born February 2, 1906)
* 3 InvisibleSun 07:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki 22:16, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 21:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other. ~ Harold Rosenberg
* 3 InvisibleSun 07:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki 22:16, 1 February 2007 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
* 1 Zarbon 21:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures. ~ Harold Rosenberg
* 3 InvisibleSun 07:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 21:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 17:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
* 3 Just A Regular New Yorker 01:54, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination. ~ Jane Wagner (born 2 February 1935)
* This has now been used, for Wikiquote:Quote of the day/September 1, 2014 3 Kalki 09:23, 2 September 2007 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
* 3 InvisibleSun 23:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 21:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
* 3.5 Just A Regular New Yorker 01:56, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. ~ Ayn Rand (born 2 February 1905)
    —This unsigned comment is by Japhy (talk • contribs) .
* 1 Kalki 18:13, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
* 1 InvisibleSun 23:07, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins. ~ Ayn Rand
* 3 Kalki 18:37, 31 January 2009 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
* 3 InvisibleSun 23:07, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
* 2 though I like the concept attributed to the "gun". - Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict — and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. ~ Ayn Rand
* 3 Kalki 18:37, 31 January 2009 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
* 3 InvisibleSun 23:07, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
* 2 Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. ~ Ayn Rand
* 3 Kalki 18:37, 31 January 2009 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
* 3 InvisibleSun 23:07, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
* 1 This is way too long but I would give this a 2 if it were shortened to the last phrase "Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours." - Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
You're not a god. You can take my word for it — this is 12 years of Catholic school talking. ~ Andie MacDowell as "Rita" in Groundhog Day
* 3 Kalki 23:53, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
* No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now — because I love you.
* ~ Bill Murray as "Phil" ~ in ~ Groundhog Day ~
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 17:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC) * 4 Kalki 23:53, 2 February 2009 (UTC) with a VERY strong lean toward 4.
* 1 Zarbon 04:31, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. ~ Ayn Rand
* 3 bystander 22:25, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 19:45, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
* History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
* ~ James Joyce ~ in ~ Ulysses ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* Does nobody understand?
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 2 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
* ~ James Joyce ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC); with a lean toward 4.
* There have been a lot of messing-with-time movies where you can't help but see the influence of Groundhog Day ... Every time it happens, my friends say: "You just got ripped off. I hope they paid you." I'm, like: "No, it's an homage." It's not like I'm being erased. It's an honour. I always thought the premise could be explored a million different ways. I welcome all of these explorations; it's fun for me because I like to see how other people play with the idea. Basically it shows how ubiquitous it's become in the culture. It's getting harder and harder now to find anyone who hasn't seen it.
* ~ Danny Rubin ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
* Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.
* ~ Roger Ebert ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)