The Uncommonplace

A collections of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest of treasures for the man of the world, for he knows how to intersperse conversation with the former in fit places, and to recollect the latter on proper occasions.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

As I was walking among the fires of Hell,
delighted with the enjoyments of Genius;
which to Angels look like torment and insanity.
I collected some of their Proverbs.

Wm. Blake

A book of quotations…can never be complete.

Robert M. Hamilton

Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made a Solomon.

Anon.

So unlike Arkady Nikolaevich, me: a master of the commonplace in an inverted world.

Bluenote

Even a stopped clock and a German are right twice a day.

Bucky Katt

Let this forever be my conscience. As I stray, may I be righted. As I fall, may I rise again.

Bluenote

(on ‘urges’)I generally think them through, slowly and deliberately, then walk them off.

Erik Vestville

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

Robert Heinlein

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

I am sure human sympathy is more important than ideology.

Sir Kenneth Clark

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.

Richard Dawkins

…but this happens so very infrequently that it’s often not even worth considering. Never mind that often both sides are simply wrong, as well.

Bluenote

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, coöperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert Heinlein

(on Napoleon having just crowned himself Emperor of France) So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!

Ludwig van Beethoven

…the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed.

Thos. Jefferson

All religions are auld wives’ fables, but an honest man has naught to fear, either in this world or the world to come.

Robert Burns

All the kids are on drugs, and all the adults are on rollerskates.

Monty Python

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Max Weinrich

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich von Schiller

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Geo. Bernard Shaw

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

W. H. Auden

Beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.

Friedrich von Schiller

Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king who led them to it.

Wm. Shakespeare

Villains of a more noble ilk than you have made me cautious and resourceful and scrappy, but you…you just made me mean.

Scrooge McDuck

I made it by being smarter than the smarties, tougher than the toughies, and I made it square.

Scrooge McDuck

Why do I smile, when pleased, instead of scowl? Why am I unable to talk to a crowd as I talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn my wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, ‘Of course I smile, of course my heart palpitates at the sight of a crowd, of course I love the maiden, that beautiful soul in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved.’

Wm. James

Against what women taken in adultery, dares the foremost of the literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A man is never an hero to his valet.

Anon.

It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Sir Kenneth Clark

If the Good Lord made anything better than a woman, he kept it to himself.

Jerry Lee Lewis

‘No love,’ quoth he, ‘but vanity, sets love a task like that.’

James Leigh Hunt

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; the heart of the fool is in the house of mirth.

Cohelet

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

not Voltaire

I have sworn upon the altar of G—d eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Thos. Jefferson

Machine must never win.

Erik Vestville

You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.

Stan Laurel

Never trust a ventriloquist or a barber.

W. C. Fields

Bravery’s no virtue when some heathen’s trying to hurt you.

Bill Watkins

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Bill Watterson

The Constitution…forms a government not a league… To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation.

Andrew Jackson

Never send a weed whacker to do a garden weasel’s job.

Trevor Ochmonek

Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

New Hampshire Constitution

Čest praci.Honor work.

Erik Vestville

I never get the girl. I wind up with a country instead.

Anthony Quinn

I will consent to nothing. The Senate must take its medicine.

Woodrow Wilson

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Sir Kenneth Clark

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thos. Jefferson

Trust them that say they are seeking. Trust them not that say they have found.

Anon.

Oh, the idea was childish, but divinely beautiful.

Friedrich von Schiller

(on being interned in a camp in Poland during the Second World War) If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like…

P.G. Wodehouse

…the Utopia experience has been proof of the secular power of faith.

Brían F. O’Byrne

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.

Thos. Jefferson

The law is made for men and allows no fellowship or bonds of obligation between them and the lower animals.

P. A. Fitzgerald

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.

Brendan Behan

…and quite honestly they have no desire to.

Bluenote

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

Brendan Behan

Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

Dr Saml. Johnson

Moi, je suis pas comme ça, moi, j’aime toutes les trois.

Bluenote

G—d forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty …And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thos. Jefferson

The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no living man with power to endanger public liberty.

John Adams

Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Immanuel Kant

Deep for the dead the grief must be
Who ne’er gave cause to mourn before.

Lord Byron

When in doubt, lubricate.
Where there’s movement, there can be improvement.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
If it worked getting ’em in, it’ll work getting ’em back out again.

Jamie Hyneman

A man is not is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

John Barrymore

Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom be right…to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future… It is not wise to look too far ahead; our powers of prediction are slight, our command over results infinitesimal. It is therefore the happiness of our own contemporaries that is our main concern; we should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear…we can never know enough to make the chance worth taking… There is this further consideration that is often in need of emphasis: it is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

John Maynard Keynes

Sapere aude!

Horace

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Wm. Wirt as Patrick Henry

Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. ‘Herr Altmann,’ said his secretary, ‘I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?’ ‘On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know — it makes me feel a whole lot better!’

anecdote

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

Steven Wright

I always keep a large supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.

W. C. Fields

Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.

Jamie Murphy

Better to eat French dung for a hundred years than Chinese dung for a thousand.

Hò Chí Minh

I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love and an outlaw in Peru.

Hugh Gallagher

You should be kissed, and often, by Someone who knows how.

Rhett Butler

Chi va piano va sano e lontano.
He goes long who slowly and quietly.

Italian proverb

Es liebe die Freiheit!
Long live freedom!

Hans Scholl, last words

‘That is fornication, sir, and I am against it!’
‘But it was long ago, and in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’

misquoted by my father from Barabas, in Kit Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J. B. S. Haldane

The universe is not only queerer than we can suppose, but queerer than we suppose we can suppose.

Bluenote

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

T. E. Lawrence

Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without an accordion – all you do is leave behind a lot of noisy baggage.

Anon.

Look, you can’t do something if you can’t spell it. That’s why most of us are allowed to ‘drive a car’ or ‘date rock stars’ but not allowed to give an ~~electrocenepheloghram~~ … ~~electricensephologram~~ … brain scan thingy.

Diana Goodman

‘Verisimilar’ is very similar to ‘very similar.’

G. S. Zlotin

I believe our current foreign policy resembles the TV show ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ — Step 1) find dangerous and bad tempered subject. Step 2) Poke it with a stick until it tries to kill you.

April X.

Anybody in love, come here. I want to break Venus’ ribs with a club and cripple the goddess’ loins. If she can pierce my tender breast, why can’t I break her head with a club?

Pompeijan graffito

English is what you get when Normans try to pick up Saxon girls.

Bryan Maloney

Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation…as much as it is also about freshness.

Anthony Bourdain

Never trust a thin chef.

Bluenote

Nobody knows anything about nutrition. Is milk good or bad?
beat
I rest my case.

Lewis Black

Every baby should be given a banjo and an Australian accent.

Bluenote

A Frenchman, when asked about British cuisine, replied, “If it’s cold, it’s soup; if it’s warm, it’s beer.”

In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations — it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.

Stuart Keate

I ask the world to accept our martyrdom as penance for the German people.

Carl Gördeler

The West — the very words go straight to that place of the heart where Americans feel the spirit of pride in their western heritage; the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man.

John Wayne

A generation that dresses in thong underwear never could have defeated the Third Reich.

Brooke McEldowney

Those quotation marks were utterly vulgar.

idem

There’s no such thing as talent, Cap’n. Only aspiration and ambition.

Scrooge McDuck

Among all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable — with the possible exception of a moose singing ‘Embracable You,’ in spats.

Woody Allen

We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as G—d gives them to us.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher…and that is a good thing for any man.

Socrates

Two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe…The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Immanuel Kant

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

R. W. Emerson

Don’t marry the person you want to live with, marry the one you cannot live without.

Anon.

A person should not promise to give a child something and then not give it, because in that way the child learns to lie.

Babylonian Talmud

Know thyself.

Anon.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Still…

Bluenote

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

Ernest Hemingway, attr.

And if you give us any more trouble, I shall visit you in the small hours and put a bat up your night-dress.

Basil Fawlty

It’s later than you think.

Robert W. Service

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.

Anatole France

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to engage in insider trading, accept bribes while holding political office or launder money through the Cayman Islands.

Bluenote

For you, I die.

G. F. Händel

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called rain.

Michael McClary

Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.

Anon.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Anon.

Only worse.

Bluenote

When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is an higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Running away is the coward’s way out of war; appeasement is the coward’s way into one.

Anon.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

Henny Youngman

Do not cease to drink beer, to eat, to intoxicate thyself, to make love, and celebrate the good days.

Ancient Egyptian proverb

Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual…It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was the clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was ‘intelligence’ after all, but the ability to read into things?

Stephen Fry

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

Thos. Jefferson

There’s gold and it’s haunting and haunting
It’s luring me on as of old
But it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s that great, big, broad land way up yonder.
It’s the forest where silence has lease
It’s the beauty that fills me with wonder
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

Robert W. Service

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‘em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Theodore Roosevelt

To ask is no sin and to be refused is no calamity.

Russian proverb

Learn to say, ‘No.’ It will be more use to you than to be able to read Latin.

Charles Spurgeon

Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.

Szílard Léo

It is queer how it is always one’s virtues and not one’s vices that precipitate one into disaster.

Dame Rebecca West

It was the most disgusting perversion I’d heard all day — and I’d been up since 5 A.M.

Anon.

I don’t think I’m allowed to call it the Rhubarb Triangle any more. Apparently, it wasn’t custard, it was some kind of yeast infection.

Jimmy Carr

Sometimes there just isn’t enough vomit in the world.

Stephen Fry

He doth talk drivel, but I do like him very much.

Stephen Frost

You conjugate…I decline.

Brooke McEldowney

Leo Tolstoy was stupid and abnormal.

Bluenote

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, my religion is to do good.

Thos. Paine

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

idem

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Anon.

Dying’s easy; living’s hard!

Anon.

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

Pogo

The sunshine of his days Was spent in the grey of his mind.

The Pretty Things

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

Hermann Göring

A loud voice can make even the truth sound foolish.

Irish proverb

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Mark Twain

They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge.

Thos. Brackett Reed

There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.

Jack E. Leonard

He is not only dull himself, but he is the cause of dullness in others.

Dr Saml. Johnson

He has delusions of adequacy.

Walter Kerr

There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless –boys and women– and I am neither one.

Greek proverb

Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

Mikhail Bakunin

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Yogi Berra

‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying, ‘My mother drunk or sober.’

G. K. Chesterton

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon

No matter how beautiful you think she is; no matter how much you’re in love with her or how perfect she is, if she eats a dodgy piece of fish, she’ll end up like chucking her guts up like the rest of us.

Father Harper

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Ernest Hemingway

Always do drunk what you said you’d do sober. That will teach you people not to ask you for anything.

Bluenote

Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.

Anon.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

— How much do you love me?
— In liters or gallons?
— Uh…gallons. Never go metric.

Brooke McEldowney

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

Stewart Alsop

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

Marcus Aurelius

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

idem

The great Victorian actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, when asked by a London cabbie, ‘Where to, guv?’ replied, looking coldly up from his work, ‘Do you really think that I should give my address to the likes of you?’

anecdote

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Cardinal Bellarmine; 1615, during the trial of Galileo

Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.

Niels Bohr

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Raymond Chandler

Life is too short to drink bad wine.

Winston Churchill

A revolutionary with a taste for wine has travelled half the distance from Marx to Burke.

Allan Robbins

I don’t want to die, but I wouldn’t care if I were dead.

Cicero

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors. One would look in vain for reasons to justify it, by differences in physical constitution, intelligence, moral sensibility. This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

Marquis de Condorcet

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Denis Diderot

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Benjamin Franklin

You know how it is when you go to be the subject of a psychology experiment, and nobody else shows up, and you think maybe that’s part of the experiment? I’m like that all the time.

Steven Wright

I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not! But I’m sick and tired of being told that I am!

John Cleese

Come, my little one, and give me your hand.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe, dying words

Is it the Fourth?

Thos. Jefferson, dying words

Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.

Erskine Childers to his firing squad

Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.

John Dryden

Never perform an experiment which might be harmful to the patient even though highly advantageous to science or the health of others.

Claude Bernard

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Dostoyevsky

Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.

Rudyard Kipling

Take nothing you like seriously, except yourselves.

Bluenote

Dividing mathematics into linear and non-linear components is like dividing the universe into bananas and non-bananas.

Anon.

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

James Madison

If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.

Tom StoppardAlexander Herzen

Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?

George Price

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been indicted.

Jeffery Rosen

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt

Come all ye young men, ye rovin’ young men
Come all ye young men, where’er ye be
Beware ould Whiskey, Nancy Whiskey
She’ll ruin you like she ruinèd me.

Traditional Irish (or Scots?)

A couple hours in the library can frequently be saved by a few months in the laboratory.

Anon.

He stumbled home from Clifton Fair
With drunken song and cheeks aglow
But there was something in his air
That told of kingship, long ago.
I turned, and inly burned with grief
That one so high should fall so low.

But he plucked a flower and sniffed its scent
And waved it towards the sunset sky
Some old sweet rapture through him went
And kindled in his bloodshot eye
I sighed, and inly cried for joy
That one so low should rise so high.

Anon.

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

Bella Abzug

Keith Richards met the Devil and came back a changed man. Shane MacGowan met the Devil and sent him to Hell and the Races.

Bluenote

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.

Frank Zappa

A man faithful to the Constitution doesn’t stop criticizing presidents when the letter after their names changes.

Bob Barr

The greatest truth that you will ever learn,
Is just to love, and be loved in return.

eden ahbez

Praise loudly; blame softly.

Catherine the Great

Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present.

Anon.

Φιλία εστι μία ψυχὴ δύο σώμασιν ἐνοικοῦσα.
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Aristotle

(paraphrasing Captain Picard) What Shakespeare said with irony, I say with conviction: ‘And this above all: to thine own self be true.’

Bluenote

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Bertrand Russell

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

Geo. Bernard Shaw

Days pass slowly, years quickly.

Bluenote

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill is modern art.

Tom Stoppard

There’s a Tesco on the sacred ground
Where I pulled her knickers down
While Judas took his measly price
And St Anthony gazed in awe at Christ
Down on Rain Street

Shane MacGowan

With a man’s dying breath, he should be prepared to make a fresh start.

Berthold Brecht

Whenever anyone says, ‘I’m not a prude, but…’ he always means, ‘I am a prude, and…’

John Cleese

Slander drives a wise man crazy and breaks a strong man’s spirit.

Solomon

I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own. A costive reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself.

Thos. Jefferson

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Cesare, Marquis de Beccaria

I hope we shall crush…in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Thos. Jefferson

They say that opera is not what it used to be. Opera is exactly what it used to be, and that is precisely what is wrong with it.

Noel Coward

Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

Sir Humphry Davy

Man shall not cease from exploration,
But the end of all his exploring.
Will be to arrive at the place
Where he first began,
and know it for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

Alfred, Lord Tennyson once wrote the lines, ‘Every moment dies a man;/every moment one is born.’ The venerable Charles Babbage, inventor of the difference engine, visionary scientist and would-be connoisseur of fine writing, said in a letter to him, ‘If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poems should read: ‘Every moment dies a man/Every moment 1 1/16 is born.’ Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 to be sufficiently accurate for poetry.’

anecdote

Would that it must to have been done; but might the will that could need it not be to dare and, indeed, can make it that which ought to be done?

Bluenote

The term ‘neologism’ was coined in 1803.

Merriam-Webster

Muß es sein? Es muß sein! Must it be? It must be!

Ludwig van Beethoven

No doubt they are bad things if you make yourself a slave to them; but then most things to which you make yourself a slave are bad — with some rare exceptions in the case of women, and then only because a few of them accept the slavery as reciprocal.

Prof. Geo. E. B. Saintsbury

Get place and wealth, if possible with grace
If not, by any means, get wealth and place.

A. Pope

There is endless talk about the harmfulness of alcohol, but whenever an epidemic erupts somewhere, it’s always because of water.

Czech proverb

A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial.

Philo of Alexandria

I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.

Dylan Thomas well, some of us aren’t…

When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

idem

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

idem

So manifest one’s vices seem inside
While quiet virtues midst all doubt abide.

Bluenote

I was on the wrong track with Fichte, I admit it — Fichte was trying to get rid of objective reality.

Tom Stoppard’s Mikhail Bakunin — nb that this should have tipped me off that Fichte was into something

(on curing syphilis with quicksilver) From Venus to Mercury.

Anon.

(on the world’s two oldest professions) The world was divided into two categories; those whose lips moved and those whose lips didn’t move.

Stephen Fry

…and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…

Thos. Jefferson

Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that One.
Thereafter rose Love in the beginning, Love, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their hearts’ thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent.
Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
I, the first origin of this creation, whether I formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

Hymn 129 of the Rig Veda

Oh, the English came and they jumbled up the letters
But the brave Irish boys made it into a word.

Bill Bailey

Evolution is a change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous sticktogetherations and something-elseifications.

Wm. James

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Dorothy Parker, attrib.

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.

Charles Schulz

You know that it’s Love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is better than your dreams.

Dr Seuß

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

W. Somerset Maugham

Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin.

Robert Collier

Railroading on the Great Divide,
Nothing around me but Rockies and sky:
There you’ll find me as years go by,
Railroading on the Great Divide.

Sara Carter

We always understood each other. We agreed that the physical proceeded from the intellectual…that intimacy cannot exist before understanding, that love is a prerequisite for lovemaking.

Edda Burber

Tranquility in love is a disagreeable calm.

Molière

Love guides the stars to each other, the world plan only endures through love.

Friedrich von Schiller

We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

Tom Robbins

We must keep trying, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D. H Lawrence

Love is friendship set on fire.

French proverb

…and taken to the bitter end.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Napoleon Bonaparte

To partake of the lowest lows is fulfulling, not so much as it is to partake of the highest highs, but both soundly beat the grey no-man’s-land between them.

Bluenote

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Voltaire

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

Geo. Bernard Shaw

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

attr. Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.

Theodore Roosevelt

There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.

idem

Also, all of life’s big problems include the words ‘indictment’ or ‘inoperable.’ Everything else is small stuff.

Alton Brown

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, one hundred.

Thos. Jefferson

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate — to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.

idem

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

Upon Michael Faraday’s demonstration of induction to produce an electrical current, the Lord Mayor of London made bold to inquire what possible use there could be for such a device. Replied Faraday: ‘You shall tax it yet!’ German humor is no laughing matter.

Mark Twain

There is no human condition so miserable that it cannot be worsened by the presence of an officer of the law.

idem

Never commit yourself to a cheese without having examined it first.

T. S. Eliot

The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.

Michael Faraday

We don’t say we know all the answers, but one thing’s for sure: it’s notjustthatsimple!

Penn & Teller

If we hadn’t a thorough understanding, I might almost be tempted to ask what you are doing there with our little playfellow.

1911 political cartoon caption

The truth-teller’s punishment is not that he is always believed, but that he always believes, himself.

Bluenote

Smart people can be stupid just because they are so smart. They’re smart enough to weave a story that justifies what they’re doing.

Ray Hyman

The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man’s fate.

T. E. Kalem

This is because they are a race of foreigners, imprinted with the grammar of the Gaelic, with the born fluence of native Saxons.

Bluenote

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

I’m just following the Irish tradition of song writing, the Irish way of life, the human way of life. Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure.

Shane MacGowan

The most important thing to remember about drunks is that drunks are far more intelligent than non-drunks. They spend a lot of time talking in pubs, unlike workaholics who concentrate on their careers and ambitions, who never develop their higher spiritual values, who never explore the insides of their head like a drunk does.

idem

Kiss: a noun both common and proper, never singular, and agrees with both you and me.

Anon.

Were’t the last drop in the well,
And I gasp’d upon the brink,
Ere my fainting spirit fell,
‘Tis to thee that I would drink.

Lord Byron

Be sure you’re right. Then go ahead.

Davy Crockett

Threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed.

Richard C. Carrier, Jr.

We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves.

Charles Caleb Colton

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’

Quentin Crisp

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

Havelock Ellis

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men — that is genius… Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist… What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think… Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

idem

The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages.

Frank Zappa in 1981

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.

Oscar Wilde

The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected; Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson — not a one had professed a belief in Christianity… Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.

The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, 1831

…the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.

John F Kennedy

Genius is pathological.

Bluenote

You can’t palm me off with margarine.

Stephen Fry

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.

Charles Schulz

It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.

Seneca the Younger

The believer is happy, the doubter is wise.

Hungarian proverb; cf. Cohelet, supra

Quitters never win, and winners never quit.

Denise Worrell

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence.

Henry Brooks Adams

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Niels Bohr

Christian ethics are seldom found save in the philosophy of some unbeliever.

Heywood Campbell Broun

‘I have done my best.’ That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.

Lin Yutang

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Never was anything great achieved without commensurate danger.

Niccolò Macchiavelli

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

Alfred Adler

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

Edgar Allan Poe

The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukelele in an attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.

James Thurber

(an Apologia) How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was — so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.

Plato via Socrates

Beatrix Potter is Jane Austen writ small.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, charactering all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged ‘clinical insight’ or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.

Frederick Crews

‘Successfully validated epistemology?’ Don’t make me laught, you git. (Ps — and poems? Seriously? Shove off.)

Bluenote, in uncharacteristic pique

(to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria) Don’t bother to look; I’ve already composed all this.

Gustav Mahler

…ſuffice þine owen þyng, ðo’ it be ſmal…

Geoffrey Chaucer

—‘Something has fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that can fall on them.’
—‘What do you mean?’
—‘We have found the truth; and the truth makes no sense.’

G. K. Chesterton

He took one of the candles, lit it carefully, came back and stuck it in the neck of the whiskey bottle. The unrestful night air, blowing through the crazy window, waved like the long flame like a banner. And on every side of the castle they could hear the miles and miles of black pine wood seething like a black sea around a rock.

idem

‘Crazy window’ lifts this paragraphs to Gothic greatness.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

[H]is whisky was properly aged, but his money never quite could be.

Michael R. Marrus

(to Debussy at a rehearasal of De l’aube à midi sur la mer ) I liked it all, but particularly the little bit at a quarter to eleven.

Erik Satie

A difficulty should always be dealt with in a cool and deliberate way, and with an oriental disregard of time.

C. A. Mace

Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap in the afternoon. When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. BE AWARE OF WONDER.

Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde
Sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani. O, ye, who of sound intellect
Behold the doctrine which conceals itself
Beneath the veil of threse anagogical verses!

Dante

I had no conception of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, passionless lust, and all the inexpressible brutalities which degrade human nature, could be carried, until I had lived a few days among the Venetians.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

But death, fires, and burglary, make all men equals.

Charles Dickens

‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass — an idiot.’

idem

It is a world of disappointment; often to the hopes we most cherish, and hopes that do our nature the greatest honor.

idem

Faustus: How is it then that thou art out of Hell?
Mephistopheles: Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.

Kit Marlowe

True, there is a difficulty with poker. There are those who believe that the sole duty of the poker gamesman is to build up his reputation for impenetrability and toughness by suggesting that he last played poker by the light of the moon made more brilliant by the snows of the Yukon, and that his opponents were two white slave traffickers, a ticket-of-leave man and a deserter from the Foreign Legion. To me this is ridiculously far-fetched, but I do believe that a trace of American accent —West Coast— casts a small shadow of apprehension over the minds of English players.

Stephen Potter

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you’ll find is laughter:
That’s all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.
Be happy!

Dr Francis Rabelais

I intend and insist that you learn all languages perfectly; first of all Greek, in Quintilian’s method; then Latin, then Hebrew, then Arabic and Chaldee. I wish you to form your style of Greek on the model of Plato, and of Latin that of Cicero. Let there be no history you have not at your fingers’ ends, and study thoroughly cosmography and geography. Of liberal arts, such as geometry, mathematics, and music, I gave you a taste when not above five years old, and I would have you now master them fully. Study astronomy, but not divination and judicial astrology, which I consider mere vanities. As for civil law, I would have thee know the digests by heart. You should also have a perfect knowledge of the works of nature, so that there is no sea, river or smallest stream, which you do not know for what fish it is noted, whence it proceeds, and whither it directs its course; all fowls of the air, all shrubs and trees whether forest or orchard, all herbs and flowers, all metals and stones, should be mastered by you. Fail not at the same time most carefully to peruse the Talmudists and Cabalists, and be sure by frequent anatomies to gain a perfect knowledge of that other world called the microcosm, which is man. Master these and your young days, and let nothing be superficial; as you grow into manhood you must learn chivalry, warfare and field manœuvres.

idem

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft is thought but ne’er so well expressed.

Alexander Pope

To kenn must fynde betweenneys wið þe Troþe:
What Wordes do nott; iust ðat is trewly Sooth.

Bluenote

Love redeems, and absolute Love redeems absolutely.

Anon.

I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood —the black dresses and the shaving of the hair— was so horrible, so terrifying. Of course, that’s all been stopped. They’re sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day.

Peter O’Toole

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to Hell.

W. H. Auden

I’m a bit older than my teeth but not as old as my soul.

Anon.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on earth tolerable.

Nick Hornby

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their souls is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

Saki

Good wine is a necessity of life for me.

Thos. Jefferson

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Rafael Sabatini

Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

England is a country for city men and rural women. (…but Ireland does both well.)

Bluenote

I believe in going with the flow. I’m a hedonist. I like to live well. I like to eat and drink and dance and sing and screw and get the most out of life.

Shane MacGowan

It is customary in the higher echelons of the British Diplomatic Service never to knock on the door before entering a room, lest by doing so one implies one suspects a colleague is doing something improper within.

This is odd, since you need only hear the litany ‘Burgess, McLane, Philby, &c.’ and wonder how many thousand bloody improper things occured amongst members of the higher echelons of the British Diplomatic service.

It is in the autumn, not the spring, that chefs are reborn.

Robert Carrier

A hamper is undoubtedly requisite under the present circumstances. It must contain several pots of superior jam.

Lord Curzon, writing home from school (aged 9)

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Epicurus of Samos

Bordeaux appeals to the æsthete as Burgundy appeals to the sensualist.

Hugh Johnson

—You speak treason!
—Fluently.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Dead lucre: burnt Ambition: Wine is best.

Hilaire Belloc

The childish palate will always at first prefer the excessive or the unbalanced taste.

Clifton Fadiman

We may know we are happy when we do not know we are smiling.

idem

It’s only a naïve domestic without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.

James Thurber

All thinking men are atheists.

Ernest Hemingway

No thinking men are atheists.

Bluenote

He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash.

Lord Roxton on Col. Percy Fawcett

He’s quietly on fire.

Steve Ferguson

Excuse me, honey, this is the United States of America. We’ve got freedoms here you can’t even imagine.

Howard Stern

Whoso belongs only to his age reverences only its popinjays and mumbo-jumboes.

attr. Thos. Carlyle

All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question: what are light quanta? Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.

Albert Einstein

It is a commonplace that men are basically all alike. But we do not live in the realm of the basic.

Bluenote

—Astronomy, not astrology.
—What’s the difference?
—About fifty IQ points.

Brian Dalton

Now what is very strange, there is scarce a popular error passant in our days, which is not either directly expressed, or diductively contained in this Work; which being in the hands of most men, hath proved a powerful occasion of their propagation. Wherein notwithstanding the credulity of the Reader is more condemnable then the curiosity of the Author: for commonly he nameth the Authors from whom he received those accounts, and writes but as he reads, as in his Preface to Vespasian he acknowledgeth.

Thos. Browne

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master…Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, there is no democracy.

Abraham Lincoln

There’s a Marie Louise under every rock.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

But Richard — don’t you enjoy being vulgar once in a while?

David Daube, to RvK

Great minds are very near to madness.

Fogarty misquoting Pope

A cheap and effective way to stop yourself falling asleep while driving during a long car journey is to trap a lock of your hair in the sunroof.

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope

Heine had a fine, self-lacerating irony. The answer might have appealed to that sardonic sense of humor which sometimes goes with a tendency to the sentimental.

A. D. Hope

And, lo, they were very dry.

Ezekiel 37:2

The ax was scharpe, the stokke was harde,
In the xiiii of Kyng Richarde.

Anon., XIIII C.

I will describe you in a word. Thou. (I beg your pardon.)

James Joyce; Finnegans Wake

The life expectancy of lions is much lower than that of the antelopes they chase. This is due to a combination of a high cholesterol diet and lack of exercise. The short sprints a lion makes are absolutely exhausting and not the sort of sport doctors recommend for anyone, let alone those suffering from high cholesterol.

anecdote

Don’t let your heart get broken by this world.

Dan Bern

Peter O’Toole, in his Celtic Hell-raiser days, was kicked out of a pub late one morning with a friend of his. Not knowing quite what to do with themselves, O’Toole suggested the go see a play. As they were sitting down halfway through the first act, he turned to his friend and said, ‘This is the best bit — this is the part where I come on… Oh, damn!’

Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.

Cohelet

Sometimes there’s change on the ocean
Sometimes there’s change on the sea
But there’s never no change in my own true love
And there’s never no change in me.

Anon.

The idea that people’s beliefs, merely by being deeply held, merit respect is grotesque.

Oliver Kamm

Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes. It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt.

Judith Olney (likewise grenadine in Shirley Temples

‘Why do you have to turn everything into a joke?’
‘Generally, it’s to avoid confronting the very real and difficult issues that most proper adults have to deal with.’

Dr McCartney

First of all gods she contrived Love.

Heraclitus

What is love? Admiration without envy; familiarity without contempt; chocolate without asking.

Brooke McEldowney

Ladies imply gentlemen.

Erik Vestville

(and of course…) Gentlemen imply ladies.

Bluenote

Cæsar’s wife must be above reproach.

attr. C. Julius Cæsar

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

John Adams

I always forgive my enemies — nothing annoys them nearly as much.

Jordan MacDeere

On Sense and Wit your Passion found,
By Decency cemented round;
Let Prudence with Good Nature strive,
To keep Esteem and Love alive.
Then come old Age whene’er it will,
Your Friendship shall continue still:
And thus a mutual gentle Fire,
Shall never but with Life expire.

Jonathan Swift

Oh, they will turn me in your arms
To a newt or a snake,
But hold me tight and fear not;
I am your baby’s father.

And they will turn me in your arms
Into a lion bold,
But hold me tight and fear not
And you will love your child.

And thy will turn me in your arms
Into a naked knight,
But cloak me in your mantle
And keep me out of sight.

Traditional, ‘Tam Lin’

Guitars, port and a good friend; but banjoes, madeira and my Bride.

Bluenote

Omne clocha clochabilis, in clocherio clochando, clochans clochativo clochare facit clochabiliter clochantes.
Every clocking clock, clocking away in its clocktower, clocking clockingly clocks the clocker clockings.

Dr Francis Rabelais

It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend, one’s present or future thirst, the excellence of the wine, or any other reason.

Latin proverb

Every word ever spoken or written is an indelible stain on the perfection of silence.

J. Cosgrove Butchie, after Saml. Beckett

When one begins eating peanuts, one cannot stop.

H. L. Mencken

So much is a man worth as he esteems himself.

Dr Francis Rabelais

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good : they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing ; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed, DO WHAT THOU WILT. Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us.

Dr Francis Rabelais

Love, and do what thou wilt.

St Augustine of Hippo

With the exception of the maleness-determining gene on the Y-chromosome, every functioning gene in a man’s body is found in a woman’s and vice versa. The maleness gene is a developmental switch that can activate some suites of genes and deactivate others, but the same blueprints are in both kinds of bodies, and the default condition is identity of design. There is some evidence that the sexes depart from this default in the case of the psychology of reproduction and the adaptive problems directly and indirectly related to it, which is not suprising; it seems as unlikely that peripherals as different as the male and female reproductive systems would come with the same software. But the sexes face essentially similar demands for the rest of cognition, including language, and I would be surprised if there were differences in deisgn between them.

Steven Pinker (I don’t know what this says about my quite feminine ‘reproductive psychology’)

This is true Love. Do you think this happenaems every day?

S. Morganstern

Two people are afraid of an empty rifle: the one with the rifle and the one without it.

Afghani proverb

I thought, perhaps, if the girl is so beautiful, and cast in this divine form, why not leave her with this plain simple robe? Why put make-up, earrings, rings, colored materials and furs on her?

Mikis Theodorakis

The so-called self-expression of so much modern art is meaningless egotism unless it conveys some general message about shared human experience.

Gail Holst

…’cause unlike snot, it doesn’t taste nice.

Stephen Fry

Freedom is when one hears the bell at seven o’clock in the morning and knows it is the milkman and not the Gestapo.

Georges Bidault

If you are polite in German, you are lying.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.

German proverb, a rather sorry entry by its own lights

Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

Christian Morgenstern

After spending my days in a world awash with drugs, depravity, and a titillated indifference to life, liberty and morality…getting tucked into bed at night seems rather reassuring.

Brooke McEldowney via Edda Burber

A year there was of glory,
Of promise false and fair,
When Downing Street was Tory,
And England foiled the Bear;
When all the wine succeeded
From Douro to Moselle,
And all the papers needed
The wares I had to sell;
When, friends with love and leisure,
Youth not yet left behind,
I worked or played at pleasure,
Found god —and goddess— kind;
Played my last rubber cosy,
Took my last miss at loo,
When all my world was rosy,
But when I knew not — You!

the Judicious Poet, XIX C.

Humility is the mother of giants: one sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

G. K. Chesterton

…fiction (which is only another kind of fact)…

Prof. Geo. E. B. Saintsbury

— And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
— I did.
— And what did you want?
— To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

Don’t look back; they might be after you.

Satchel Paige

(when asked the secret to her longevity) Don’t get caught.

Hildreth von Kleinsmid

A bridge is two weaknesses leaning on each other, creating a strength.

Leonardo da Vinci

Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n-‘I’ except genetically? It’s disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn’t it? Great simplifications are in store for us.

Edward Sapir

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open…no artist is pleased.

There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Martha Graham

What you ask is against reason and God. I spit on you and your master, and look forward to passing water over both your graves at a later date.

Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson

And though lovers be lost, Love will not
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

What you got, boy, is hard to find.

Ke$ha

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

Гроза начнëтся, позже, къ вечеру.A storm is coming, later, towards evening.

M. A. Bulgakov

I reject your reality, and substitute my own.

Adam Savage

Die Liebe wintert nicht;
Nein! nein!
Ist und bleibt Fruhlingesschein.

True Love doth not winter
No, no!
It is spring and ever remains.

Ludwig Tieck

Das wahrhaft Schöne, Große und Erhabene, so wie es uns in Erstaunen und Verwunderung setzt, überrascht uns doch nicht als etwas Fremdes, Unerhörtes und Niegesehenes, sondern unser eigenstes Wesen wird uns in solchen Augenblicken klar, unsre tiefsten Erinnerungen werden erweckt, und unsre nächsten Empfindungen lebendig gemacht.

The truly beautiful, the great and sublime, when it overpowers us with astonishment and admiration, still does not surprise us as a thing foreign, never heard of, never seen; but, on the other hand, our own inmost nature in such moments becomes clear to us, our deepest remembrances are awakened, our dearest feelings made alive.

idem

I told You I’d always Love You;
I always did and I always will.

Shaney Mac

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, If

Riddles are power games. ‘I know something you don’t.’

Otto Friedrich

Remember your last name, and when in doubt, stand up.

idem, quoting his uncle

When in doubt, shake hands, and never decline a chance to use a lavatory.

The Duke of Windsor

Give away your lands if you want to, but don’t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won’t gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

Orwell explaining the second moral in King Lear

They tell the story of a throwback
With the heart of a lion

the Dropkick Murphys

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief —call it what you will— than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

A. A. Milne

Whoever lives true life, will love true Love.

E. B. Browning

He that can’t live upon Love deserves to die in a ditch.

Congreve

Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende.
Love, that all gentle hearts so quickly know.

Dante; Inferno V. 100

Amor ch’ a nullo amato amar perdona.
Love, which insists that Love shall mutual be.

Dante; Inferno V. 103

Oh, tell me whence Love cometh!
Love comes uncall’d, unsent.
Oh, tell me where Love goeth!
That was not Love that went.

J. W. Ebsworth, Burden of a Woman

He marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skillful in a thing vie in competition; those who have no skill, judge.

Diogenes Lærtius, of Anacharsis the Scythian

…an upstart Crow beautifed with our Feathers, that with his Tygres heart, wrapt in a players hyde supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a Blank verse as the best of you…

Robert Greene, on Shakespeare

—So is everyone in England…like that?
—No, there’s a few blokes in Sheffield who aren’t complete spanners.

Get Fuzzy

For men can endure to hear others praised only so long as they can severally persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity.

Pericles’ funeral oration, as recorded by Thucydides

His fortitude and firmness seem to have placed him out of reach of misfortune. There is an original something in him that commands admiration; and his long captivity and sufferings have only served to increase, if possible, his enthusiastic zeal.

George Washington on Ethan Allen

All I can say about life is, ‘Oh, God, enjoy it!’

Bob Newhart

Where they drank their Wine in Bowls,
To gratifie their thirsty souls.

Anon.

…he was one of the lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed. That he was only too cognitively conatively cogitabundantly sure of it because, living, Loving, breathing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

No, I always tell the truth. That’s what scares ‘em.

Nick Harper

Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets hims apart
From every other creature
On Earth.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Patriotism ruins history.

idem

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

Logan Pearsall Smith

He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.

Proverbs 17:27

So I hope someday that troubles will be gone.

The Tallest Man on Earth; added 26 Jun 10 to see if someday…

'For me, to think, to feel, to understand and to suffer are one and the same thing,’ he liked to say. This was, of course, true to the Romantic ideal, to the belief that real understanding comes not only from mere thinking (reason), but also from intuitive insight. This combination of thinking and feeling pervaded Belinsky’s life.

Anon., on Vissarion Belinsky

Language is the dress of thought.

Dr Saml. Johnson

The consolation of reading biography: most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

Edward Abbey

Clear wine was once called a Saint;
Thick wine was once called a Sage.
Of Saint and Sage I have quaffed deep,
What need have I to study the sutras?
At the third cup I penetrate the Tao;
A full gallon — Nature and I are one…
But the things I feel when wine possesses my soul
I will never tell to those who are not drunk.

Li Po

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals a goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Anon., XVIII C.

Such a man, such a fine soul — and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!

Antonín Dvořak on Brahms

Mental illness is a sane response to an insane world.

R. D. Laing

There is no truth in news, and there is no news in truth.

My misprision of a Soviet-era proverb or witticism

The truth lies when reason and emotion are in congruence.

Rosalind Darcy

The power…that parents have over their children arises from the duty to take care of their offspring.

John Locke

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
and live by Love
(though the stars walk backward)

e. e. cummings

The word ‘classy’ is vulgar and the word ‘vulgar’ is classy.

Bluenote

Only wholly You.

idem

The word ‘God’ is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

Matthew Arnold

Physical laws rest on atomic statistics and are therefore only approximate.

Erwin Schrödinger

One plus one, it is one — it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.

Arvo Pärt

Revolutions are like motorcycles: either you ride them or you crash.

Anon.

The ‘perfect marriage’ of food and wine should allow for infidelity.

the Baron Roy Andries de Groot

All of Charlie Parker’s heads sound like a drunk bum singing to himself.

Tim Weed

The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent — that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgement. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgement of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mahommedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions… The Hebrew persecuted and down trodden in other regions takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid… and the Aegis of the Government is over him to defend and protect him. Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free government would be imperfect without it.

John Tyler

Cabbage served twice is death.

Greek proverb

The left hemisphere has difficulty disengaging, and this seems to be precisely because, instead of familiarity causing it to disattend, it causes it to attend all the more.

Dr Iain McGilchrist (the emissary should serve the Master)

Quisque faber suæ fortunæ.
Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

Appius Claudis Cæcus

The poet must know everything.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s hard wark haud’n by a thocht worth haen
And harder speakin’t, and no for ilka man;
Maist Thocht’s like whisky — a thoosan under proof,
And a sair price is pitten on’t even than.

Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of Wisdom.

George Iles

You first parents of the human race, who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.

idem

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlightened with Champagne.

Dr Saml. Johnson

The eyes are the spoons of speech.

Arab proverb

It is an ill wind indeed that blows no good.

English proverb

In the particular is contained the universal.

James Joyce

The best chance of reproducing the ancient Greek temperament would be to cross the Scots with the Chinese.

Hugh MacDiarmid

One who is proud of ancestry is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

Saml. Butler

But it takes a genius like Michel Richard to see that in the case of the carrot, the good is both above and below.

Bluenote

If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.

John Napier

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Walter Pater, after Novalis

They don’t have your best interests at heart, sharks.

Billy Connolly

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in an other hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of an other.

Thos. Jefferson

Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ … Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. … Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. … If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

Abraham Lincoln

Even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate natural law, which would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that He does not care for human affairs.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI

From good wine you cannot make bad Latin.

Dr Francis Rabelais

Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them, and Champagne makes you do them.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition of American liberalism.

Will Hutton

The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.

Frans de Waal

And I am an human being, classically proportioned.

Bluenote, on the above

An Apollonian is a private Dionysian. A Dionysian is merely a Dionysian.

Bluenote

The saints are the sinners who kept on trying.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are good enough in their own way but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for Life.

idem

And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.

idem

Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.

idem

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

idem

Provide me with ships or proper sails for the celestial atmosphere and there will be men there, too, who do not fear the appalling distance.

Johannes Kepler

Hope makes a good breakfast, but a poor supper.

Kit Marlowe

Hope makes a poor breakfast, and a worse supper.

Jim Kotos

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

Wm. Shakespeare; Cymbeline

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.

Vladimir Nabokov, interview with The Paris Review, 1967

The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.

ibid.

Tho’ I’ve belted you and flayed you
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din

Les querelles ne dureraient pas longtemps, si le tort n’était que d’un côté.Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.

François de la Rochefoucauld; Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

La sincérité est une ouverture de coeur. On la trouve en fort peu de gens; et celle que l’on voit d’ordinaire n’est qu’une fine dissimulation pour attirer la confiance des autres.
Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.

ibid.

Il est du véritable amour comme de l’apparition des esprits: tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu. True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen.

ibid.

Only the pure of heart can make good soup.

Ludwig van Beethoven

All the nine songs known to bears are about wild pears.

Turkish proverb

Better a small piece of a big pie, than a big piece of a small one.

Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian

It was the overture to decades of what Gulbenkian called ‘orchestrations’ —concessions, mergers, consortia, nervy negotiations, adamantine patience. The conclusion consisted of the words ‘to C. S. Gulbenkian … in perpetuity, 5% of the Iraq Petroleum Co., Ltd.’

Time Magazine, June 23rd, 1958

[E]s ist das schrecklichste Gegenmittel gegen ungewöhnliche Menschen, sie dergestalt tief in sich hinein zu treiben, dass ihr Wiederherauskommen jedesmal ein vulkanischer Ausbruch wird. Doch giebt es immer wieder einen Halbgott, der es erträgt, unter so schrecklichen Bedingungen zu leben, siegreich zu leben; und wenn ihr seine einsamen Gesänge hören wollt, so hört Beethoven’s Musik.

[I]t is the most terrible antidote against unusual individuals to drive them that much back into themselves that their re-emerging causes a volcanic eruption each time. However, there will always be a demi-god, every now and then, who will be able to live under such terrible conditions, and that victoriously: and if you want to hear his lonely songs, listen to Beethoven’s music.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 3. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung

יש בן חורין שרוחו רוח של עבד, ויש עבד שרוחו מלאה חירות; הנאמן לעצמיותו – בן חורין הוא, ומי שכל חייו הם רק במה שטוב ויפה בעיני אחרים – הוא עבד There could be a freeman with the spirit of the slave, and there could be a slave with a spirit full of freedom; whoever is faithful to his self — he is a freeman, and whoever fills his life only with what is good and beautiful in the eyes of others — he is a slave.

Abraham Isaac Kook

Relationships that can be shared with others can always be explained by common-sense theories.

Benjamin Schumacher

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.

attr Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

James Howell

(on the Brothers Adrià) And, being isolated and inexperienced, they began to do new things.

Lisa Abend

We’ve got a black sense of humor (krrrrsshhh sshhh). Which is perfectly suited to New York. I think that’s why we’re understood in New York, much better than we are anywhere else in America.

Shane MacGowan

‘Tis an ill cook that can’t lick her own fingers.

Jonathan Swift

People don’t break rules that really have to do with the language’s structure.

John Hamilton McWhorter V

A person who lies badly almost certainly tells the truth appallingly.

Brooke McEldowney

The were yield debt to the wife, and also the wife to the were. The wife hath not power of her body, but the were; also forsooth the were hath not power of his body, but the wife. Do not ye defraud each to other.

I Corinthians 7:3-5

Even the Torah is on Earth.

The Talmud

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Stephen Hawking

Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to drink on an empty bloody head?

Billy Connolly

Only God helps the badly dressed.

Spanish proverb

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one’s own, it is always twenty times better.

Francisco José Goya y Lucientes

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts

Evil imputed is evil betrayed. When accusations fly, keep your peace, focus on the accuser, fasten on his words. What he charges will be a guess as to the contents of your mind, a dead certainty as the contents of his own.

Brooke McEldowney

Criticism tends to be self-portraiture. And the harsher and more pitiless the criticism, the more monochrome the self-portrait.

idem

Art by democracy —other than being a disastrously jejune and fatuous idea— would amount to a dereliction of duty to my reader… If you want something produced by a herd, expect manure.

idem

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

Jonathan Swift

If you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.

Richard Feynman

Dividing animals into ‘vertebrates’ and ‘invertebrates’ is also like dividing the universe into bananas and non-bananas.

Bluenote; v. sup.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law…but that other one-tenth is really something.

Brad Anderson, Marmaduke

The world’s in a rush, but I’m going to wait until I’m perfect.

LL Cool J

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.

Steven Wright

One does not have a birthday if one is immortal.

Bertrand Devort

Uniqueness isn’t the issue. Unlikeness is the issue.

Dr Derek Bickerton

I am sure the music of the spheres is in D in 6/8 .

Bluenote

There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head.

Theodore Roosevelt

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

Voltaire

Trust in God and Davis, but keep your powder dry!

Anon.

Norse-Gael in Ulster; that’s practically Scottish.

Anon.

Добродетель нѣ всегда красиво, но норокъ всегда безобразенъ.
Virtue not always be beautiful, but vice is always ugly.

G. S. Zlotin

The barrel rots if there is no wine in it.

idem

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Martin Heidegger

The general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians.

T. S. Eliot

Grief may be joy misunderstood;
Only the Good discerns the good.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.
God made the integers; all else is the work of man.

Leopold Kronecker

Sillaba votz es literals.
Segon los ditz gramaticals.
En un accen pronunciada
Et en un trag: d’una alenada.

A syllable is the sound of several letters,
According to grammarians,
Pronounced in one accent
And uninterruptedly: in one breath.

Guilhem Molinier, Leys d’amor — as good a definition as any, and better than most, Berber and Salish aside

Wherefore a man shall forsake his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be twain in one flesh.
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Genesis 2:24, Wycliffe and the King James

…we may not have conscious free will but we do have conscious free won’t.

David Curzon, summarising current thinking on free will

A theory that simply interprets the phenomenon of free will as illusory and denies the validity of this phenomenal fact is less attractive than a theory that…accomodates the phenomenal fact.

Abraham Libet

Explore monogamy!

George Michael, in a stunning case of, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’

Caldum meiere et frīgidum pōtāre.

The Satyricon of Petronius

There’s always another rainbow.

Don Rosa’s Fergus McDuck

Love is total — that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.

Pope Paul VI

An Irish-soldier in the Imperial service, in a battle against the Turks, called out to his comrade that he had caught a Tartar. ‘Bring him along then,’ said he. ‘He won’t come,’ answered Paddy. ‘Then come along yourself,’ replied his comrade. ‘Arrah,’ cried he, ‘but he won’t let me.’

anecdote

[A] cranky liberal Democrat who disagrees sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy, who supported Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush and write of Black English as coherent speech.

John Hamilton McWhorter V

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

idem

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

idem

Every jack has his gillian.

XVIII C. canting proverb

Norwegian is Danish spoken in Swedish.

Scandinavian proverb

Only the lewd inflame the lewd.

Dr Saml. Johnson

Гусары денегъ нѣ берутъ!
Hussars never take money!

Russian proverb

Докторъ сказалъ «въ моргъ» — значитъ въ моргъ!
The doctor said, ‘To the morgue!’ — to the morgue it is!

Russian proverb

Bach by all means and at all times.

Steve Ferguson

Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.

Mary Pickford

…[T]hanklessness towards God and malice towards men constitute about an awkward a ‘soul-diathesis’ as can be imagined.

Professor Geo. E. B. Saintsbury

…(the maximum of dances with the minimum of partners)…

idem

I do as I like, and others may do as they like.

idem

He that resfuseth instruction despiseth his own soul.

Proverbs 15:32

[T]here is nothing finer than when a man and his wife live together in true union, sharing the same thoughts.

Homer

I do not prize the word ‘cheap.’ It is not a badge of honor. It is a symbol of despair. Cheap prices make for cheap goods; cheap goods make for cheap men; and cheap men make for a cheap country.

Wm. McKinley

The goal is not perfection…it is pleasure.

Michel Richard

The goal is not pleasure…it is perfection.

Bluenote, summarising Coomaraswamy inter alia

Being unique isn’t so bad, so long as you’re not alone.

Bluenote

(on ‘the bankrupts of rationalism’) He who accepts this brushing aside of the question ought to be told what an uncanny gap he thereby allows to remain in his picture of the world.

Erwin Schrödinger

Sane sicut lux seipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic veritas norma sui et falsi est.
Truly, as light manifesteth itself and darkness, thus truth is the standard of itself and of error.

Benedict Spinoza

Und dieses Geistes höchster Feuerflug
Hat schon am Gleichnis, hat am Bild genug.

And thy spirit’s fiery flight of imagination
Acquiesceth in an image, in a parable.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Das Sein ist ewig, denn Gesetze
Bewahren die lebend’gen Schätze,
Aus welchen sich das All geschmückt.

Being is eternal; for laws
There are to conserve the treasures of Life
On which the Universe draweth for beauty.

idem

‘Virginals’ is a plurale tantum.

Bluenote

…those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one — not merely similar or identical…

Erwin Schrödinger; What is Life? and other essays

Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually bright light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify be speech and writing or even by their very lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten.

ibid.

It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted — and afflict the comfortable.

Gene Kelly in Inherit the Wind

…[W]e may…assert that physical theory in its present state strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind and Time.

Erwin Schrödinger

A man without a collection is a man without a soul.

Anon.

Is minic a lean maidin bhrónach oíche shúgach.’Tis many a sad morning followed a merry night.

Irish proverb

Ná bris do loigrín ar stól nach bhfuil i do shlí. Do not break your shin on a stool that is not in your way.

idem

Is folamh fuar é saol gan bean. A life without a woman is emptycold.

Bluenote, after an Irish proverb

Chastity is as much continual and abundant conjugation (&hgo.) as possible within truelock, and total declension (&hgo.) without.

Bluenote

One’s native language is a closely fitting garment.

Erwin Schrödinger

If I be Thine, then I alone be Thine.
As Thou art mine, so Thou alone art mine.

Bluenote

Prajñānam brahma.
Aham brahmāsmi.
Tat tvam asi.
Ayamātmā brahmā.
Sarvam khalv idam brahm.
Sachchidānanda brahma.

Consciousness is Brahman.
I am Brahman.
Thou art that.
This Atman is Brahman.
All this that we see in the world is Brahman.
Brahman is existence, consciousness and bliss.

Mahāvākyas (‘Great Sayings’) of the Upanishads

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Matthew 5:3-11

But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew 5:28

This is the sort of day that history teaches us is better spent in bed.

Uncle Willy, High Society

Hey, I didn’t get to where I am being bashful.

Ken Frank

Give the hardest job to the laziest worker, and he’ll find the fastest and easiest way to to it.

Anon.

Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

G. K. Chesterton

The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behavior approaches the purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamic), as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.

Erwin Schrödinger

Si un hombre nunca se contradice, será porque nunca dice nada.
If a man never contradict himself, it must be because never says anything.

Miguel de Unamuno

But we’ll try, desh it all!

Bluenote

To assert that We are One is as erroneous as to claim that Gaurisankar and Everest are the same peak.

idem

Love lasts, but marriages seldom do.

idem, on his parents

It is more than half the battle…today, in a world where the imitation often looks better than the real thing and where price seems to bear less and less relationship to quality.

The Baron Roy Andries de Groot

Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

idem, making me a conservative?

Just as the political and social development and the sequence of historical events in general are not thrust upon us by the spinning of the Fates, but largely depend on our own doing, so our biological future, being nothing else but history on a large scale, must not be taken to be an unalterable destiny that is decides in advance by any Law of Nature.

Erwin Schrödinger

I must explain that I am not at all interested in biographical matter relating to myself and that I consider the modern practice of publishing details about the lives and personalities of well-known men is nothing but a vulgar catering to illegitimate curiosity…this is not a matter of ‘modesty’ but of principle.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Know and master thyself.

idem

From the Stone Age until now, quelle degringolade.

John Lodge

I could not of course be satisfied with merely ‘sociological’ explanations since the forms of traditional societies can only be explained metaphysically.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

I am neither a saint nor an intellectual giant, but I do say those whose authority I rely on when I speak, have been both.

idem

[Rhetoric is] the art of giving effectiveness to truth.

C. S. Baldwin, summarising Plato and Aristotle

…insofar as they are musical and therefore wise and good…

Ananda K. Coomarawamy

The individual’s eccentric behavior is perceived to be the outward expression of his unique intelligence or creative impulse. In this vein, the eccentric’s habits are incomprehensible not because they are illogical or the result of madness, but because they stem from a mind so original that it cannot be conformed to societal norms.

Erm…Wikipedia again. But it’s so perfect!

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained…[the lack of eccentricity] is the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill

Docti rationem componendi intelligunt, etiam indocti voluptatem.
The learned, employing reason, understand, while the unlearned seek pleasure.

Quintilian (understanding it to mean ‘merely pleasure,’ of course)

Manufacture for the needs of the body alone is the curse of modern civilisation.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Ars sine scientia nihil.

Jean Mignot

Blessed is the man on whose tomb can be written, Hic jacet nemo.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

A friend of mine gave a lecture about the subject of ESL to a regular university English class. When he finished, the regular teacher said ‘That was quite an interesting explanation, but in relation to your point about contractions, I actually don’t ever use them myself.’ He told me that the class began to giggle at that point and he didn’t think that the teacher ever forgave him for the embarrassment. I think that linguistically naive persons, especially highly educated ones, really do believe they speak like a book. One of the major advantages of phonetic transcription is to clearly indicate otherwise.

Judy Gilbert

When he puts things in brackets, it doesn’t mean that it’s phonetic transcriptions; rather, it just means that it’s IPA.

Dr John Wells, perhaps my favorite scholarly put-down

I remember at school, when I was in the classical sixth, the teacher wrote ϕιλόγος on the board instead of ϕιλόλογος. ‘Please sir,’ I said, ‘you’ve committed a haplology.’ (I was a real smart-arse as a teenager.) The teacher replied sarcastically, ‘I have made a simple mistake.’

John Wells

I was so distraught after studying German with Herr Lindberg, I had to take the course from an Austrian before I felt better.

Bob Bass

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

English proverb

A coward dies a thousand times before his death. The valiant never taste of death but once.

Wm. Shakespeare; Julius Cæsar

I have the whole world against me, I show my back and the whole world is following me.

English proverb

Break the Law as the Law should be beaten.

idem

A good man in an evil society seems the greatest villain of all.

idem

If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, smash the drawing room to pieces!

Vyvyan

Infatuations are a-plenty. Love is rare.

Pashi

Without convention there is no art.

Anna Kamieńska

The Hell of unwritten poems.

idem

How awful that I used to write those silly, pseudo-philosophical poems, full of pathos and unnecessary ornaments! I should have written only and exclusively about fulfilled love.

idem

Shouldst thou fear to drink wine from Form’s flagon, thou canst not drain the draught of the Ideal. But yet beware! Be not by Form belated: strive rather with all speed the bridge to traverse.

Jāmī

Even as the Sun, the eye of the universe, is not contaminated by the defects of things outwardly seen, so the Inner Self of all beings is uncontaminated by the evil in the world, which evil is external to it.

KU V.11

We delight in knowing evil things, although the evil things themselves delight us not.

St Thos. Aquinas, Summa Theologica

…the natural desire for what is good and beautiful is for the good as such and for the beautiful insofar as it is the same as the good…

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy summarising Dionysus the Areopagite

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

Thos. Paine

’Tis better to ask forgiveness than permission.

The Gentlemen Rabble of X Marks the Scot

…[A]ll beings are not their own being apart from G—d, but by participation…

St Thos., Sum. Theol.

The truth of art is to Natura naturans [rather than ‘Natura naturata’ —Ed.]

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Ugliness, like other evils, is a privation.

idem

‘Honesty’ having been identified with spiritual (or intelligible) beauty, St Thos. Aquinas remarks that ‘nothing incompatible with honesty can be simply and truly useful, since it follows that it is contrary to man’s last end.’

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

It is the intelligible aspect of the work of art that has to do with man’s last end, its unintelligible aspect that serves his immediate needs, the ‘merely functional’ artifact corresponding to ‘bread alone.’

idem

The concurrence here of the laws of art with those of morals, despite their logical distinction, is remarkable.

idem

Delicia operationem perficit. Pleasure perfects the operation.

St Thos., Summa Theologica

All love, delight, satisfaction and rest in (as distinguished from desire for) anything, implies a possession (delectatio autem vel amor est complementum appetitus)…it is…an imperfect cause that is not yet in posession of what it desires.

idem

Musicorum et cantorum magna est
Isti dicunt, illi sciunt quæ componit musica.distancia:
Nam qui canit quod non sapit, diffinitur bestia;
Bestia non, qui non canit ante, sed sapit usu;
Non verum facit ars cantorem, sed documentum.

Between the true ‘musicians’
and the mere ‘songsters,’
The difference is that the latter vocalize, the former understand the music’s composition.
He who sings of what he savors not is termed a ‘brute;’
Not brute is he who sings, not merely artfully, but usefully;
It is not art alone, but the doctrine that makes the true ‘singer.’

Guido d’Arezzo

(on the bankrupts of sensibility and advocates of ‘self-expression’) Is not the ‘mystic,’ after all, the only real ‘practical’ man?

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Science rendereth the work beautiful; the will rendereth it useful; perseverance maketh it lasting.

St Bonaventure

…[T]here is no connexion of novelty with profundity;…when an author has made an idea his own he can employ it quite originally and inevitably, and with the same right as the man to whom it first presented himself, perhaps before the dawn of history.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, making Us able to have a Gothic cathedral for a house

Since nominalism destroys the revelation doctrine, the first tendency is to deprive beauty of any cognitive significance.

Iredell Jenkins

…[S]i solummodo elegantiam rei vidamus, non illam usamus, aliquantim facticium illam facimus.
If we merely see a thing’s elegance, we are not using it, but making a fetish of it.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

…the immaterial office of personal devotions is actually the same as the imaginative procedure of the artist, with only this distinction, that the latter subsequently leads to manufacture…

idem

Nature…is not the object of the subject-object relation, but the relation itself. There is, in fact, no clear-cut division between the subject and the object; they form an indivisible whole which now becomes nature. This thesis finds its final expression in the wave parable, which tells us that nature consists of waves and that these are of the general quality of waves of knowledge, or of absence of knowledge, in our own minds…. If ever we are to know the true nature of waves, these waves must consist of something we already have in our own minds…. The external world is essentially of the same nature as mental ideas.

Sir James Jeans

It is only one who has attained an immediate Gnosis that can afford to dispense with theology, ritual and imagery: the Comprehensor has found what the Wayfarer is still in search of.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

It is metaphysically that he obtains the drinking of Soma; it is not literally partaken of by him.

Aitareya Brāhmana

Gentlemen, be democrats in life, but aristocrats in art!

Arturo Toscanini

— Would you choose one life over one thousand?
— I refuse to let arithmetic answer questions like that for me.

Mr Data and Captain Picard

And men who touch their own genital organ and emit their seed seriously imperil their souls, for they excite themselves to distraction; they appear to Me as impure animals devouring their own whelps… When a person feels himself disturbed by bodily stimulation let him run to the refuge of continence, and seize the shield of chastity, and thus defend himself from uncleanness.

Hildegard von Bingen, understanding the uncleanness to refer to mere pleasure, rather than pleasure in Love

Castitas vincet.

Bluenote

Coming events cast their shadows before… Through familiarity with bodies one may very easily, though very hurtfully, come to believe that all things are corporeal.

St Augustine

Il pittore pinge se stesso.
The painter paints himself.

Leonardo da Vinci

…[O]ne may, as Plutarch said, being so præoccupied with obvious ‘fact’ as to overlook ‘reality,’ confuse Apollo with Helios, ‘the sun whom all men see’ with ‘the Sun whom few know with the mind.’

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, quoting the Atharva Veda

To be properly expressed, a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.

idem

The traditional artist is always expressing, not indeed his superficial ‘personality,’ but himself, having made himself that which he is to express, and literally devoting himself to the good of the work to be done. What he has to say remains the same. But he speaks in the stylistic language of his own time, for, to repeat the words of the Laṇkāvatāra Sūtra already cited, ‘Whatever is not adapted to the such and such persons as are to be taught, cannot be called a ‘teaching.’’

idem

…Mencius says that to grasp the true meanings of words requires not so much a dictionary or a knowledge of epistemology as a rectification of personality.

idem

The æsthetic experience empathetically realized and the cognitive experience intuitively realized can be logically distinguished, but are simultaneous in the whole or holy man who does not merely feel but also understands. It is not at all that the value of beauty is minimized, but that the occasional beauty of the artefact is referred to a formal cause in which it exists more eminently; there is a transubstantiation of the image, in which there is nothing taken a way from the participant, but something added.

idem

The parabolical (Sanskrit parōkṣa) is contained in the literal (Sanskrit pratyakṣa).

W. Andrae, cf. Joyce’s dictum

‘The sensible forms, in which there was at first a polar balance of physical and metaphysical, have been more and more voided of content on their way down to us: so we say, This is an ‘ornament.’’ It becomes, then, a question of the restoration of significance to forms that we have come to think of as merely ornamental…what we have most to avoid is a subjective interpretation, and most to desire is a subjective realization.

Ananda K. Coonaraswamy, and quoting W. Andrae

The respect that is paid to the image passes over to its archetype.

St Basil

De natura castaconstantiæ: quod vide documentum.

Bluenote

Quare Deus factus, Ea facta sum; quocirca Eam amo, et eam adhoc perfectiore amo.
Wodurch ich werde Gott, ich werde Sie; weshalb ich Liebe sie, und mehr völlig liebe ich Sie.
Whereby I am become G—d, I am become She; wherefore I Love Her, and Love Her yet more perfectly.

Bluenote

…Nonexclusivity
Must be forbidden…

Anon. double dactylist summarizing Pauli and Heisenberg…and others

Belief is an aristocratic virtue: ‘unbelief is for the mob.’ In other words, the traditional society is a unanimous society.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

…[I]t is only in democracies, soviets and dictatorships that a way of life is imposed on the individual from without…[t]he major problems of conduct are decided by the tyranny of the majority and the minor problems by each individual for himself, and there is no real agreement, but only conformity or nonconformity.

idem

Where everyone thinks for himself, there is no culture, but only an aggregate. The common and divine Reason is the criterion of truth… ‘Insofar as we participate in the memory of that Reason, we speak truth, but whenever we are thinking for ourselves ( ιδιασωμεν ), we lie.’

idem, and quoting Sextus Empiricus; cf. David’s ‘horde of independent thinkers’

Shrewd prudes don’t get
Caught in the nude.

David Curzon

Small animals, no. Horses…

Captain Picard

A democracy is rule by many proletarians, a soviet is rule by a few proletarians and a dictatorship is rule by one proletarian.

Bluenote after Coomaraswamy; cf. the Allthing, the oligarchy and the monarchy

Spiritus est qui vivificat: caro non prodest quicquam. It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.

John 6:64

Well, not much…

Bluenote (nota bene that whilst he’s being somewhat cheeky, he’s also very serious in that, particularly insofar as the mortification and deprecation of the Flesh (Matter) is, firstly, not optimific and not universally willable; second, it contravenes the natural respect due this image and figure of the Divine)

Man shall not live by bread alone.

Matthew 4:4

That we can admire a Romanesque building —an ‘architecture without drainage’— at the same time that we despise the mind of the ‘Dark Ages’ is anomalous; we do not see that it may be the fault of our mentality that ours is a ‘drainage without architecture.’

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

I insist upon the view that ‘all is waves.’

Erwin Schrödinger

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

idem

He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive.

Walter J. Moore on Schrödinger

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality — if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality — reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

Albert Einstein in a letter to Schrödinger

The thoughts that are expressed to me by music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.

Felix Mendelssohn

Music is…time made free of temporality.

George Steiner

Denial is a left-hemisphere speciality.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Dictum pactum meum. My word is my bond.

Motto of the London Stock Exchange

People? I — ain’t — people!

Lena Lamont

Berlioz was sobbing at a musical performance, and a sympathetic onlooker remarked, ‘You seem to be greatly affected, monsieur. Had you not better retire for a while?’ Berlioz snapped in response, ‘Are you under the impression that I am here to enjoy myself?’

anecdote

Indeed at the risk of appearing to allow the left hemisphere even less to walk away with, I should point out that there is evidence that even those of the highest verbal, as well as spatial, ability probably rely to a greater extent on the right hemisphere. Perhaps inevitable following from that, it turns out that those of highest intelligence, whatever their discipline, may do so.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

What I want to suggest is that, just as wissen could sometimes be applied to people and living things, kennen can be applied to a lot more than our acquaintances. This kind of knowing may help us to understand, rather than simply amass information about, a host of things in the world, animate and inanimate. In fact threre is clear evidence that we used to do this in the past, but have lost the habit or perhaps even the ability… In other words, knowing a piece of music, like knowing other works of art, is a matter of kennenlernen.

idem

Metaphor is language’s cure for the ills entailed on us by language (much as, I believe, the true process of philosophy is to cure the ills entailed on us by philosophizing).

idem

For the left hemisphere, language/figures/idols can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality.

idem

May I have a throat shaped like a screw, that food go down more slowly and be enjoyed more!

Burgundian proverb

À table, que la fête commence!
To table, that the feast commence!

idem

In the eighteenth century, women of quality were given three funeral orations — one by a philosopher and two by regular guests at her table.

Music is an holistic medium, ‘multimodal’ as Mithen puts it, not limited to a distinct modality of experience.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life — not a virtual representation of life, but a form of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Literal language, by contrast, is the means whereby the mind loosens its contact with Reality and becomes a self-consistent system of tokens. But, more than this, there is an important shape which which we will keep encountering: something that arises out of the world of the right hemisphere, is processed at the middle level at the left hemisphere and returns finally to the right hemisphere at the highest level.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Man’s success has been…in creating close-knit societies, the basis of civilisation [in the freest and least doctrinaire sense] .

idem

Often, it seems to me, such positions [pop neurology in favor of the right hemisphere] conceal an undercurrent of opposition to reason and the careful use of language, and once words slip their anchors, and reason is discounted —as some quite influential post-modern and ‘feminist’ critics have advocated— Babel ensues… The work of the left hemisphere needs to be integrated with that of the right hemisphere, that is all.

idem

[W]e neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world. That is true of perceptual qualities, not just of values. If there be no ‘real’ mountain, for example, separate from one created by the hopes, aspirations, reverence or greed of those who approach it, it is equally true that its greenness, or greyness, or stoniness lies not in the mountain or in my mind, but comes from between us, called forth from each and equally dependent on both…

idem

[S]pinoza preëminently understood the way in which the universal is attained to only via the particular; ‘the more we understand individual things, the more we understand G—d.’

Dr Iain McGilchrist quoting Spinoza, cf. Andrae and Joyce

On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world. In this however only the bodies are subject to change. The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged.

Anon., quoted in Mind and Matter

On my knees I beg Monseigneur to recall me immediately. Christmas night was fatal to my soul. I fear damnation from this English Plum Pudding.

Anon. French gourmand parish priest sent to England to cure his gluttony, and also in the Drydenian sense

He who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.

Dr Saml. Johnson

The senses are crucial to the ‘presence’ essent of being, ‘to our apprehension of an is in things that no analytic dissection or verbal account can isolate.’

Dr Iain McGilchrist

[H]eidegger saw language as integral to whatever it brings forward, just as the body is to Dasein, not as a mere container for thought.

idem

It is being that speaks within us, and not we who speak of being.

Merleau-Ponty

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.

Martin Heidegger

Empedocles wrote that, ‘the primeval fire hid itself in the round pupil,’ protected by delicate membranes from the waters flowing round it.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Estragon; cf. the Sabatini supra

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

Wm. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(on the activeness of gaze; cf. Schrödinger) The right hemisphere’s gaze is intrinsically empathic, by contrast, and acknowledges the inevitability of ‘betweenness:’ in fact it is the fact of gaze being an empathic process that makes the detached stare [i.e., of the left hemisphere; simply receptive biomechanical sensation] so destructive.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Types are not reductions downward, but aspirations upward.

Bluenote

The reason Shakespeare’s tragedies are so good and his comedies so bad (mar dhea) is that he studied Greek models for the former and Roman models for the latter.

idem

What is offered by the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere is offered back again and taken up into a synthesis involving both hemispheres. This must be true of the process of creativity, of the understanding of works of art, of the development of religious sense sic In each there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed, analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it hads undergone.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.

Immanuel Kant

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος. In the beginning was the Word.

John 1:1

Im Anfang war die Tat! In the beginning was the Deed!

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe’s inversion of that Johannine pronouncement — but is not Logos an act, an action, and not a passion? I’ll let dear Iain and dear Ananda scrap that out, what?

Omnis determinatio est negatio. All determination is negation.

Benedict Spinoza, determinatio in the sense of ‘bringing something into sharper focus’ — ‘de’ and ‘terminus,’ and all that

Wo aber den Gefahr ist, wæchst
Das Rettende auch.

Where there is danger, grows
Also its specific.

Friedrich Hölderlin, taking it to mean that where there is danger (the left hemisphere), there is the capacity for saving, once aufgehoben by the right once more

…the left hemisphere’s intemperate attacks on nature, art, religion and the body, the main routes to something beyond its power.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Imitation gives rise, paradoxically as it may seem, to individuality.

idem

I strolled alone through a fall-out zone and came out with my soul untouched.

Bruce Springsteen

Into blinding darkness entereth he who worshipeth ignorance and into greater darkness he who worshipeth knowledge alone.

Isavasya Upanishad

Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure.

Heraclitus

All things are full of gods.

idem

The way to learn a language is not to analyze it, but to synthesize it.

Bluenote

If you make a lot of money, hang onto it.

Lew Fiskin

Philosophy, though neither the beginning or the end of wisdom, it is a necessary point between the two.

Bluenote

…[O]ne chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. With the loss of the power of intuition, rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigeur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or — to be absurdly rational.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

These stories live not by idle interest — that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity, not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of primæval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them.

Bronisław Malinowski

Purity of heart is to will one Thing.

Søren Kierkegaard

Words are sons of the Earth; things are the daughters of Heaven.

Dr Saml. Johnson

The power-hungry will always aim to substitute explicit for intuitive understanding. Intuitive understanding is not under control, and therefore cannot be trusted by those who wish to manipulate and dominate the way we think; for them it is vital in such contexts, with their hidden powerful meanings that have accrued through sometimes millennia of experience [be it noted, not reasoning], are eradicated.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Ако ми е ябанджийче, ще го люба, люба;
Ако ми е ябанджийче, ще го люба дор до живот
Кавал свири, кавал свири.

And if he be a outlander, I will love him, love him
And if he be an outlander, I will love him all my life
He plays the kaval, he plays the kaval.

Bulgarian song

Philosophy never seems to me to have a better hand to play than when she battles against our presumption and our vanity; when in good faith she acknowledges her weaknesses, her ignorance and her inability to reach conclusions.

Montaigne

Every logical system leads to conclusions that cannot be accommodated within it.

Dr Iain cGilchrist paraphrasing the philosophical and mathematical discovery of Montesquieu, Blaise Pascal and Kurt Gødel

Being in True Love is like learning a language: one masters declension before learning conjugation.

Bluenote, again variating on a theme of McEldowney, q.v.

Eih bennek, eih blavek! Here I am, here I stay. Hier bin ich, hier bleib’ ich. (lit.) If you gather thistles, expect prickles. (idiom.)

King Ottokar IV

He who divines the secret of my music is delivered from the misery that haunts the world.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Coffee should be as black as Hell, as strong as death, and as sweet as love.

Turkish proverb

So should Christmas pudding.

Bluenote

Traditional art invites a look. Modernist art engenders a stare.

Susan Sontag

Originality is antithetical to novelty.

George Steiner

No one in love is an atheist.

Bluenote

Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls [sic] with whom they make up a sole family — a domestic church.

Karol Wojtyła

Both the believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about G—d will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with ‘care’) towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say ‘no’) to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but rather through and beyond them. This is why the left hemisphere is not its enemy, but its valued emissary. Once, however, the left hemisphere is convinced of its own importance, it no longer ‘cares;’ instead it revels in its own freedom from constraint, in what might be called, in a phrase of Robert Graves’s, the ‘ecstasy of chaos.’ One says ‘I do not know,’ the other ‘I know — that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

It is as though a power that has an infinite, and therefore intrinsically uncertain, potential Being needs nonetheless to submit to be delimited —needs stasis, certainty, fixity— in order to Be.

idem

(on Bach’s chorale prelude ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir’)If a man had lost all his faith, just hearing it would be enough to restore it.

Robert Schumann

A word is a finger that points at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger. Zen masters, therefore, will never stop cursing words and letters.

Soiku Shimegatsu

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the temple of science is written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’ It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with… Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Max Planck

They’re nocht but zoologically men.

Hugh MacDiarmid

My advice is to not let the boys in.

Bob Dylan

…the Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativity.

Albert Einstein

(on the disjunction of subject and object) This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory.

Michael Polanyi

Id teneamus, quod ubique, semper et ab omnibus creditum est. The true faith is what by everyone everywhere has always been believed.

St Vincentius of Lerins

Credo ut intelligam.
Fides quærens intellectum.

I believe, that I may understand.
Faith seeking understanding.

St Anselm of Canterbury

I speak French to men, Italian to women, Spanish to G–d and German to horses.

Charles V

You would.

Bluenote

I speak Færoese in Fane, Irish in Love, and English in Truth.

Bluenote

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

Winnie-the-Pooh

Pine for the divine?
Divine the design
Don’t design the divine.

David Curzon

This bears on the theory that the different living species have come into existence by accidental mutations. This can be affirmed only if, first you accredit the distinctive pattern of living beings as exhibiting a peculiar orderliness which you trust yourself to appraise, and second you accept at the same time the belief that evolution has taken place by a vastly improbable coïncidence of random events combining to sn orderly shape of a highly distinrive character. However, if we are to identify —as I am about to suggest— the presence of significant order with the operation of an ordering principle, no highly significant order can ever be said to be solely due to an accidental collocation of atoms, and we must conclude therefore that the assumption of an accidental formation of the living species is a logical muddle.

Michael Polányi (do I hear the sound of entropy being negated somewhere?)

Personal knowledge implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.

idem

But how can we tell that certain aggregates are disposed at random, or that certain events are occurring at random? My answer to this question will have to be postponed until much later. But I shall anticipate it here by asserting my belief that random systems exist and can be recognized as such, though it is logically impossible to give any peer use definition of randomness.

idem; c.f. Davy supra on ‘the truly religious men’

The order (contrasted with ‘randomness’) of both human creations (art; ‘Ars Artifactus,’ sozusagen) and nonhuman creations (nature; ‘Natura Naturata,’ sozusagen) are both metaphorous to Natura Naturans, or that which men call G–d. Free Will, Mind, Consciousness, Deus, Natura Naturans, G—d, Brahman is negentropy: ordering from chaos; virtue, not vice; beauty, not ugliness;.

Bluenote

Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

Wm. of Ockham

Beauty is a terrible and frightening thing. It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for G—d makes nothing but riddles.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(on Dalton’s atomic theory, refined by Bohr and Rutherford) Once more it was proved —and this time on a vast scale— that a scientific theory, when it conforms to reality, gets hold of a truth that is far deeper than its author’s understanding of it.

Michael Polányi

[T]o deny the feasibility of something that is alleged to have been done or the possibility of an event that is supposed to have been observed, merely because we cannot understand in terms of our hitherto accepted framework how it could have been done or could have happened, may often result in explaining away quite genuine practices or experiences.

idem

A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.

idem

The plou’-mon, he’s a bonnie lad
His hairt is ever true, Jo
His garters knit abune the knee
An’ his bunnet, it is blue, Jo

A will wash my plou’-mon’s sark
An’ A will wash his o’erlay
A will mak my plou’-mon’s bed
An’ cheer him late and early

Snaw white stockin’s on his legs
An’ siller buckles glancin’
A guid blue bunnet on his heed
An’ och, but he was handsome

Commend me tae the barn yard
An’ the corn mou’, mon
For A niver gat me coggie fu’
Till A met wi’ my plou’-mon.

Robert Burns’ take on a traditional Scottis sang

The wars are o’er an A’m come hame
An’ find thee still true-hairted
Tho’ puir i’ gear, we’re rich i’ lu’e
An’ mair we’se ne’er be pairted
Said she, My grandfaither left me go’d
A mailin’ plenished fairly
An’ come my faithful so’dier boy
Thou’rt welcome tae it dearly

idem

I want to seize fate by the throat.

Ludwig van Beethoven

There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works, and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be half a tradesman.

idem

(on his youth’s renown) Ah, nonsense! I have never thought of writing for renown and glory. What I have in my heart must out; that is why I write.

idem

You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She has found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes to form a union with another. With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.

Ferdinand von Waldstein, in a letter to Beethoven — but Aloysius, it gets so much better!

Als ich dieses Stück komponiert habe, war ich mir der Inspirierung vom allmächtigen Gott bewußt. Glauben Sie, ich kann auf Ihre kümmerliche kleine Geige Rücksicht nehmen, wenn Er zu mir spricht?

Ludwig van Beethoven to a violinist who complained about a passage that was, in his opinion, unplayable

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.

Frans de Waal

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

idem

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such ‘bad odor amongst real people.’ He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we’re both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

idem

The Austrians have managed quite a feat: they’ve made Beethoven one of their own and Hitler a German.

Billy Wilder

This fighter and champion of nature, which we call Beethoven, is a source from which you can drink for eternal life.

Richard Wetz

Beethoven comprehends in himself the whole, rounded, complex of human nature… Never has a musician known more nor experienced more of the music of the spheres and the harmony of G–d’s nature than Beethoven.

Wilhelm Furtwängler

With men who do not believe with me, I do not want to associate.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The only symbol of superiority I know is Goodness.

idem

There are times that I think language is good for absolutely nothing.

idem

Do what you need to fulfill your most ardent longing, and end up succeeding.

idem

Those who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic — how they are wrong about me!

idem

For you, poor Beethoven, there is no happiness in the world; you shall have to create it yourself. Only in Heaven can you find a friend.

idem

Tell your children to be virtuous; for virtue alone can bring happiness, not money.

idem

You will have better performance than it has so far nobody has thought since no one has yet owned. You never sacrifice a beautiful thought to a tyrannical rule, and do well in it. But he must sacrifice his whims to the rules, because I have the impression that you have several different heads and hearts. His works will always find something unusual, beautiful things, but also something unique and dark, because you yourself is a little scary and unique.

Franz Josef Haydn to a young Beethoven, in a very bad translation

Beethoven breathed the air of another planet.

Stefan George

Before Beethoven music was written for the immediate; with Beethoven, it began to be written for eternity.

Albert Einstein

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

A false note in singing is unimportant, but to sing without passion is unforgivable.

idem

An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

Derek Parfit

Act only on that maxim which is wholly optimific, not reasonably rejectable and whereby thou canst at the same time will uniquely that it should be a universal law.

Bluenote phrasing that imperative properly, right

All particulars become meaningless (insignificant) if we lose sight of the pattern which they jointly constitute.

Michael Polányi

The meaning of music is mainly existential, that of a portrait more or less representative, and so on. All kinds of order, whether contrived or natural, have existential meaning; but contrived order usually also conveys a message.

idem

Since we originally gained control over the parts in question in terms of their contribution to a reasonable result, they have never been known and were still less willed in themselves, and therefore to transpose a significant whole into the terms of its constituent elements is to transpose it into terms deprived of any purpose or meaning. Such dismemberment leaves us with the bare, relatively (relatively!) objective facts, which had formed the clues for a supervening personal fact. It is a destructive analysis of personal knowledge in terms of the underlying relatively (again!) objective knowledge.

idem

[P]ersonal knowledge commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality. Of this responsibility we cannot divest ourselves by setting up objective criteria of verifiability — or falsifiability or testability, or what you will. For we live in it as in the garment of our own skin. Like love, to which it is akin, thus commitment is a ‘shirt of flame,’ blazing with passion and, also like love, consumed by a devotion to a universal demand. Such is the true sense of objectivity in science, which I illustrated in the first chapter. I called it the discovery of rationality in nature, a phrase which was meant to say that the kind of order the discoverer claims to see in nature goes far beyond his understanding; so that his triumph lies precisely in his foreknowledge of a host of yet hidden implications which his discovery will reveal in later days to other eyes.

idem

If my understanding of the text were halting, or its expressions or its spelling were faulty, its words would arrest my attention. They would become slightly opaque and prevent my thought from passing through them unhindered to the things they signify.

idem

I have illustrated already in my chapter on probability how ambiguous and question-begging are all statements of the scientific method. I suggest now that the supposed pre-suppositions of science are so futile because the actual foundations of our scientific beliefs cannot be asserted at all. When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body. Their uncritical acceptance for the time being consists in a process of assimilation by which we identify ourselves with them. They are not asserted and cannot be asserted, for assertion can be made only within a framework with which we have identified for the time bieng; as they are themselves our ultimate framework, they are essentially inarticulable.

idem

…it is expressly stated of the Buddha that it belongs to his skill to reveal himself in accordance with the nature of those who perceive him.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

‘Himma’ is the power of the heart to overflow with such intense sorrows and overwhelming joys that what we feel, what we need as surely as we need air, water and bread, rises within us and takes shape in the outer world.

Douglas Halebi Blake

In no wise are the bodies themselves to be spurned… For these pertain not to ornament or aid which is applied from without, but to the very nature of man.

St Augustine

By love I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour on account of God, and by lust I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour and any corporeal thing not on account of God.

idem, keeping in mind that Deus facti sumus

Truth, another’s lust cannot pollute thee…
Chastity is a virtue of the mind, and is not lost by rape, but is lost by the intention of sin, even if unperformed.

idem; cf. Blake’s ‘wishes but acts not’ infra

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

James Joyce; Dubliners; The Dead

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

idem

Your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles, but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

idem

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

idem

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice; a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

idem

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another’s soul.

idem — Love is verily monogamous

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.

idem

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

idem

Ireland free and rich is Ireland lost.

J. Cosgrove Butchie, paraphrasing James Joyce

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of G—d.

Tom Stoppard

You think you are too intelligent to believe in G—d. I am not like you.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Question with boldness even the existence of a G—d; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Thos. Jefferson

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Francis Bacon

Alexander — Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up.
Natalie — Alexander! I won’t have that word!
Alexander — Sorry, ‘middle-class'…

Tom Stoppard

The names for things don’t come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

Tom Stoppard per Turgenev

Scotland is Ireland perfected.

Bluenote, being quite unfair to Scotland — he could have said, ‘…made practicable.’

When a man is newly wed, he need not go out on a military expedition, nor shall any public duty be imposed on him. He shall be exempt for one year for the sake of his family, to bring joy to the wife he has married.

When a woman is newly wed, she need not go out on a military expedition, nor shall any public duty be imposed on her. She shall be exempt for one year for the sake of her family, to bring joy to the husband she has married.

Deuteronomy 24:5

God is closer to me than others of my art.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The value of rationality, as well as whatever premises it may start from, has to be intuited: neither can be derived from rationality itself. All rationality can do is to provide internal consistency once the system is up and running.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

He can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupified till now, now G–d comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon, to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons.

John Donne

I was nursed at the breast until I was four, and I never have lost the taste for it, either.

Liam Clancy

Never go half-way in anything you do.

idem

‘Music,’ said she, ‘is the soul of the world embedded in sound.’

Tommy Makem quoting Ellen Reilly

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

idem

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

idem; and I dare say, vice versa, too

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

idem

Off with you! You’re a happy fellow, for you’ll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that!

idem

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, ‘Thus far and no farther.’

idem

This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble.

idem

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

idem

I am not in the habit of rewriting my compositions. I never did it because I am profoundly convinced that every change of detail changes the character of the whole.

idem

I always have a picture in my mind when composing, and follow its lines.

idem

I never write a work continuously, without interruption. I am always working on several at the same time, taking up one, then another.

idem, cf. “confusione nella testa”

Love demands all, and has a right to all.

idem

Go on; don’t only practise your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise men to the Divine.

idem

Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Belovèd, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us.

Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits.

No one else can ever possess my heart — never — never — O God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves? Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men.

My angel, I have just been told that the mailcoach goes every day — therefore I must close at once so that you may receive the letter at once.

Be calm — love me — today — yesterday ‚ what tearful longings for you — you — you — my life — my all — farewell. Oh, continue to love me — never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.

Ever thine,
Ever mine,
Ever ours.

idem, to his unsterbliche Geliebte

Things that are need not be proved; things that aren’t cannot be proved.

Bluenote

Not that ‘proof’ means much of anything, anyway.

idem

They are a god by whose dealings one lives, the mother and father of all men, alone by themselves, without an equal.

Rekhmere, who was writing on Will and Em, though he knew so not (mar dhea)

Almighty Yahweh, who hast waxed great
over the seven firmaments and continents
You’ve deserted field and barn;
I, the close love of my people.
We’ve both turned universal.
Come back, dear G–d,
Dwindle down to only ours.

They tricked You out in stars over a whole universe.
…
Why did you abandon your closet-ark,
your little tent,
going away to be converted
into the Lord of the Universe?
…

Save Yourself
Come back,
be our Jewish G–d again.

Jacob Glatstein, trns. Cynthia Ozick

Darwin considered ‘the psychological aspects of evolution as far more important, in the long run, than the morphological and taxonomic issues to which the Origin was largely devoted.’

Mark Bekoff & al.

Between heaven and Earth
There seems to be a bellows
It is empty, and yet it is inexhaustible
The more it works, the more comes out of it
No amount of words can fathom it
Better look for it within you.

Lao Tzu< on melodeons

‘Freedom of the will’ is a primary fact of experience… It seems that physics and physiology are too primitive to allow even the proper formulation of the problem, let alone its solution.

Sir John Eccles

Die Ewigkeit gleicht einem Rad, das weder Anfang noch Ende hat.Æternity is like a wheel, that hath neither beginning nor end.

Hildegard of Bingen

Jedes Geschöpf ist mit einem anderen verbunden, und jedes Wesen wird durch ein anderes gehalten. Every creature is linked with another, and each is held by another.

idem

Jedwede Kreatur hat einen Urtrieb nach liebender Umarmung. Every creature inclineth naturally towards the embrace of Love.

idem

Drei Pfade hat der Mensch in sich, in denen sich sein Leben tätigt: die Seele, den Leib und die Sinne. Three Paths hath Man within himself, which makes his life: the soul, the body and the senses.

idem

Der Mensch sollte alle seine Werke zunächst einmal in seinem Herzen erwägen, bevor er sie ausführt. One must consider first in his heart every work, evenso before he beginneth it.

idem

Wo aber denn mehr Liebe ist, wächst das Wahrheit, auch, weil da ist der G—tt und seiner Reich.Where there is more love, there is truth, because there is the G—d and his kingdom.

idem

Vera Spirita post coïtum lætissime. (Two) True Spirits are most joyful after Union.

Bluenote

Intuition…is the end result of the most sophisticated kind of reasoning.

A. X. L. Pendergast

Physical life is ‘the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the coarse lines of the Lord’s quantum mechanics.’

quoted in What is Life?

I do not find G—d anywhere in space and time — that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: G—d is spirit.

Erwin Schrödinger

Every agent acting rationally, not at random, nor under compulsion, foreknows the thing before it is, viz., in a likeness, by which likeness, which is the ‘idea’ of the thing, the thing is both known and brought into being.

St Bonaventure

Sin is a departure from the order to the end.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Wer den Dichter will verstehen,
Muß im Dichters Lande gehen.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Acts of self-renunciation are required of all those who aspire to ‘culture,’ that is, to be other than provincials.

idem

Talent perceives difference; genius unity.

W. B. Yeats

The strictest justice is sometimes the greatest injustice.

Terence

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

Carl Jung, under the heading, ‘Even a stopped clock and a German are right twice a day.’

Ye are gods.

John 10:34

Ye are G–d.

Bluenote

Philosopher Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IV, says that Beauty resides in things of full stature and that little things, though they may be elegant and symmetrical cannot be called beautiful. Whence we see that elegance and beauty differ qualitatively, for beauty adds to elegance am agreement of the mass with the character of the form, which form does not have the perfection of its virtue unless in a due amount of material.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

It seems that many social animals know how to reconcile, and for good reason. Conflict is inevitable, yet at the same time animals depend on one another. They forage for food together, warn each other of predators, and stand united against enemies. They need to maintain good relationships despite occasional flare-ups…

Frans de Waal

Like so many other forms of behavior and ‘instinct,’ aggression in any given species is actually an ill-defined array of different responses with separate controls in the nervous system. No fewer than seven categories can be distinguished. …[A]ggressive behavior is in fact one of the genetically most labile of all traits. …[A]nd if aggression confers no advantage, it is unlikely to be encoded through natural selection…

E. O. Wilson

When a boy was asked by the Law to say his father’s craft, the boy answered that his father was a crafty man of Law.

Anon. 16th C. British joke

Though you believe it not, I care not much: but an honest man, and of good judgment, believeth still what is told him, and that which he finds written.

translated by Thos Urqhuart, Dr Francis Rabelais

All men are equal in the sight of G—d: but not all men are equal in the sight of men.

Bluenote

No fear, no envy, no meanness.

Liam Clancy

The ancients believed life to have generated spontaneously within the rich mud of the Nile; and who am I to question the symbolism, if not the scientific fact, of such belief?

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Cabinet of Curiosities, p. 106

Heigh-ho, it’ll go without these oddments!

Tintin, on putting a car back together

To play Beethoven means to live dangerously.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Beethoven throws mad ideas at us and one wonders why it all seems to make sense, why it seems so normal.

Ivan Fischer

If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gurkha.

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw

And yet, however hard it is becoming for scientists to specify any fundamental difference between humans and all other animals, it is obvious that we are different in some extraordinary way, that we have, as it were, a spark of the divine in us which is lacking in them.

David Curzon

The only possible inference from the fact of both the phenomenality of statistico-determinism and freedom of the Will is, I think, that I —I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’— am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature… Hence I am God Almighty.

Erwin Schrödinger, cf. Popper’s ‘prime mover’ argument

A bachelor’s life is no life for a single man.

Saml. Goldwyn, in a particularly Irish phraseology

Death is an awful thing. I don’t believe in it myself.

Eugene Ormandy

Love loves to love love.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

T. S. Eliot

If only because to some extent the painter always paints himself, ‘it is not enough to be a painter, a great and skilful master; I believe that one must further be of blameless life, even if possible a saint, that the Holy Ghost may inspire one’s understanding.’

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy quoting Michelangelo — a saint, and a virgin and a lunatic…

…[O]ur conscious life…actually is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego.

Erwin Schrödinger

He who once a good name gets,
May piss a bed, and say he sweats.

Francis Grose

“Silence in the court, the cat is pissing”; a gird upon any one requiring silence unnecessarily.

idem

Aggressive feminists scare me.

Omar Sharif

There is a very true kernel in Lamarck’s view, namely that there is an irrescindable causal connexion between the functioning, the actually being put to profitable use of a character —an organ, any property or ability or bodily feature— and its being developed in the course of generations, and gradually being improved for the purposes for which it is profitably used.

Erwin Schrödinger

All science (Wißenschaft) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject if all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.

C. G. Jung (yes, I said twice a day)

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

Wernher von Braun, qv. Schrödinger on the ‘indestructability of Mind and Time’

Be reverent towards Life.

Albert Schweitzer

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Anon.

I will not say that with deeply religious persons such enlightenment [the non-literality and non-physicality of Heaven and Hell] had to await the aforesaid findings of science, but they have certainly helped in eradicating materialistic superstitions in those matters.

Erwin Schrödinger

The great thing [Kant’s ideas of space and time] was to form the idea that this one thing —Mind or World— may well be capable or other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time.

idem

To be allowed to play about with such a master’s programme [Time] believed unassailable until then, to play about with it albeit in a small way, seems to be a great relief, it seems to encourage the thought that the whole ‘timetable’ is probably not quite as serious as it appears at first sight. And this thought is a religious thought, nay I should call it the religious thought.

idem

Company with honesty
Is virtue vices to flee.
Company is good and ill
But every man has his free will.
The best ensue
The worst eschew
My mind shall be.
Virtue to use
Vice to refuse
Thus shall I use me.

King Henry VIII

When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Mark Twain

An argument between the intellect ( διάνοια ) and the senses ( αἰσθήσεις ):

—Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness; actually only atoms and the void.
—Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.

Democritus (Diels, fr. 125)

‘I think you’ve erred there.’
‘Oh, no, I haven’t. That’s where you go wrong.’

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

Do not ye defraud each to other, but peradventure of consent for a time, that ye give attention to prayer; and again turn again to the same thing, lest Satan tempt you for your uncontinence.

I Corinthians 7:5

This procedure [discarding with the facts after the theory has been promulgated] , while very useful for remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observation and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.

Erwin Schrödinger

If only all teachers, including parents, would take to heart the necessity of mutual understanding! We cannot exert any lasting influence over those entrusted to us without it.

idem

Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial… Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.

James Joyce

Luck is the residue of opportunity and design.

attr Branch Rickey

A Bhean ud thall aig a chuibhle,
Fhios agad fhèin mar a tha mo chridhe. O Woman at the spinning wheel,
You know how my heart is.

Anon., traditional Scots waulking sang

What’s true of making love and going to sleep is also true of things less physical: for example, attempts to be natural, to love, to be wise, or to be innocent and self-unseeing, are self-defeating. The best things in life hide from the full glare of focussed attention. They refuse our will.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

To Ruskin it was one of the hardest, as well as the greatest human achievements truly to see, so as to copy and capture the life of, a single leaf — something the greatest artists use managed only once or twice in a life time: ‘If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.’

idem, quoting Ruskin, still on the theme of Andrae and Joyce

He’s a free man because he gives away freely. I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the coöperation of other people — who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individulas who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.

Tom Stoppard’s Alexander Herzen

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am YHVH.

Leviticus 19:28

And leads you to Believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.

Wm. Blake

In music and the visual arts the formal conventions embodied intuitive wisdom that could not be discarded without loss of meaning.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

The current tendency for flesh to remain opaque, in the explicitness of pornography, for example, bids to rob sex of much of its power, and it is interesting that pornography in the modern sense began in the Enlightenment, part of its unhappy pursuit of happiness, and its too ready equation of happiness with pleasure. Like most answers to boredom, itself a modern phenomenon, pornography is itself characterised by the boredom it aims to dispel: both are a result of a certain way of looking at the world.

idem

As Alain Corbin has argued, we have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses —especially from smell, touch and taste— as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.

idem

One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

Charles Fort

If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?

idem

Yes.

Bluenote

Wenn laut der Bass im Saale hallt,
Entfaltet sich die Urgewalt. Oh, that the Bass reverberate loudly through the hall
And unleash the Force of all Forces.

Mediæval German proverb

If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.

David Ben-Gurion

La critique est aisée, et l’art est difficile. Criticism is easy; art is difficult.

Philippe Néricault Destouches

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.

Erich Fromm

Ubi amor, ibi fides.

Anon.

The characters speak in a poetic mix of phonetically spelled words inspired by parts of Creole, African-American, Brooklyn English, Yiddish, American Indian and Spanish.

Anon., on Krazy Kat

For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.

Tom Stoppard’s Alexander Herzen; the teleological fallacy

I have the metaphysique of a demigod.

Bluenote

Where the lewd speak of synchronic monogamy, We speak of diachronic monogamy.

idem — and on that metaphysique…

A picture might be worth a thousand words; but music is backed by gold where words and pictures are just fiat.

idem

…very straight, slightly shy, too, too beautiful for words, a virtual Adonis.

Richard de Marco

General, you must not hate your friends more than you hate your enemies.

Clementine Churchill

There isk a tide in th’ affairsk of mens,
Which, takink at th’ flood, leads on t’ fourchins;
Omitked, all th’ voya guv their lifes
Isk bound in shallowsk and in miseriesiz!

Wm. ‘Segar’ Shakespeare

If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless.

Anon.

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and.’

Sir Arthur Eddington

Christ, keep me from the apes of Hell!

attr Mary Magdelene; British Anon.

If anything is worth doing it is worth doing in style, and on your own terms, and nobody’s God-damned else’s!

Lucius Beebe

People who make no noise are dangerous.

Jean de la Fontaine

Wha’s like us are damned few an’ deed.

A Scotsman, via the Corries

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of æstheticism -- Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

Okakura Kakuzo

There are some who clearly have great ears, brilliant minds, agile tongues, and open hearts. As a colleague of mine once retorted, ‘We used to call that ‘talent.’’

Eric Armstrong

I was obliged to be industrious. Whosoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.

J. S. Bach

There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.

Franz Josef Haydn

People have become so comfortable with degraded behavior that we look upon chastity as laughable, and think moral turpitude is a birthright.

Edna O’Malley

Nothing sounds quite so juicey as wholesomeness when you whipser it.

the ex-Sister Aramus

Is minic a bhris beál duine a shrón. It is often that a person’s mouth broke his nose.

Irish proverb

Too hot to handle, too cold to hold, you can’t f—k with the Chosen One.

Ninja

‘Dangerous’ is a retrospective judgement.

Yitzakh

The strictest justice is sometimes the greatest injustice.

Terence

Leave it to a metaphysician to make more sense than a philosopher.

Bluenote, in parapraxis

We don’t — need — a track! It’s grɑːss!

John Cleese

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

James Joyce

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

idem

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ G—d is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

C. S. Lewis

If atheism spread, it would become a religion as intolerable as the ancient ones.

Gustave le Bon

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful, and has nobody to thank.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

If there were no G—d, there would be no atheists.

G. K. Chesterton; cf. Spinoza, ‘Sane sicut lux seipsam et tenebras manifestat…’

G—d is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job.

J. B. Phillips

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

Tom Stoppard

A country gentleman, who kept a female friend, being reproved by the parson of the parish, and styled a whore-monger, asked the parson whether he had a cheese in his house; and being answered in the affirmative, Pray, says he, does that one cheese make you a cheese-monger?

XVIII C.

— When did you leave the Catholic Church?
— That’s for the Church to say.

James Joyce to a reporter

World-famous poker player. Give her a good poker and she’ll play any tune you like.

The Goon Show

If G—d chooses to be mythopœic —and is not the sky itself a myth— shall we refuse to be mythopathic?

C. S. Lewis

Well, I wasn’t born yesterday. I might drop dead tomorrow, but I sure as H–ll wasn’t born yesterday!

Sid Fields; Seinfeld

‘When did I realize I was G—d?’ Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.

Peter O’Toole, à Schrödinger, the Vedanta and Exodus

There’s a certain majesty to the British Button Box that’s absent from most other squeezeboxes. It’s the presencing of the ‘more notes per kilogram than anything else,’ the orneriness of it, the ould-fashioned irrationality, the merry madness from the mountains a-calling and of course the gutsiness and rollickingbouncing and wetness of timbre and the wonderful name. It defies analysis and reduction; it’s quintessentially English and most thoro’ly not continental; it’s a unique, organic phenomenal reality with an order that ‘proceeds from within, moved by its form,’ defying the lifeless, imposed, mechanical artifice (sen. pej.) of the Bayan or that infernal piano thing.

Bluenote

I’m backing buttons!

John M. Kirkpatrick

They flat their fifths; we drink ours.

Eddie Condon on the practitioners of be-bop

It’s acting better than I would, if my support system were removed.

Geof Manthorne

Keep making it until you get it right. Then you’ll get it right.

idem

When you screw up as much as I do, you don’t get freaked out when something goes wrong.

idem

It is too ordinary to be invaded. Let it stand forever as a museum piece.

Napoleon Bonaparte, on Andorra

Phenomenal consciousness itself is sui generis. Nothing else is like it in any way at all.

Nakita Newton

The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality —the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside— but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to. The contrast to the Enlightenment is not between the fixity of the artificial and the fluidity of the real, but between the fixity and the chaos of two kinds of artificiality.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

They ‘resembled a Gypsy bard,’ as our old teacher assured us, ‘each one like a cup where the wine overflows its sides, beyond the power of the critics to constrain, direct or dilute.’

Douglas Halebi’s grandfather on the Great Poets

Lenin coined a slogan on how to achieve the state of communism through rule by the Communist Party and modernization of the Russian industry and agriculture: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country!’ The slogan was subject to popular mathematical scrutiny: ‘Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet power.’

anecdote

…[O]ur ears have become increasingly intellectual. This we can endure much greater volume, much greater ‘noise,’ because we are much better trained than our forefathers were to listen for the reason in it. All our sense have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the reason, what ‘it means,’ and no longer for what it is’…our ear has become coarsened. Furthermore the ugly side of the world, originally inimical to the senses, has been won over for music… Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual, and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form and color. Here, too, that side if the world originally considered ugly has been conquered by artistic understanding. What is the consequence of this? The more the eye and ear are capable of thought, the more they reach that boundary line where they become asensual. Joy is transferred to the brain; the sense organs themselves become dull and weak. More and more, the symbolic replaces that which exists… [T]he vast majority, which each year is becoming ever more incapable of understanding meaning, even in the sensual form of ugliness…is therefore learning to r each out with increasing pleasure for that which is intrinsically ugly and repulsive, that is, the basely sensual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Imagination is an insurance policy against the future.

4 Robert Winston

The Devil flees from the voice of music just as he flees from the voice of theology.

Martin Luther in a more authentic moment

But the worst contamination was yet to come, because America also had folk singers. They were people with guitars who wrote their own songs. This was obviously the real thing, not those old fogeys singing songs they’d learned from their grandparents in the pub. I mean, they didn’t even play anything! They didn’t even think to use a microphone. For the cool and sophisticated, the way forward was to put our deepest thoughts into bland melodies over a bland guitar pattern and work through our angst in a sleepy American drawl.

But traditional music isn’t cool and sophisticated, it isn’t easy listening, it isn’t quiet and introspective. It’s simple and straightforward, it’s full of life and lust, it’s dark and dangerous, it’s exotic and mysterious. It addresses the uncivilised part of human nature, it deals with epic themes in a way we can cope with, it channels our excess energy, it makes us feel we belong somewhere.

John Kirkpatrick

More than rich, more than famous, more than happy — I wanted to be great.

Bruce Springsteen

For the ones who had a notion,
A notion deep inside
That it ain’t no sin
To be glad you’re alive
I wanna find one face
That ain’t looking through me
I wanna find one place,
I wanna spit in the face of these
Badlands

idem

Paradise is the road to paradise.

Jimmy Webb

Life is in the living.
Beauty is in being beautiful.
Love is the aspiration to Love.
Believing is the road to belief.

Bluenote, variating on a theme once more

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.

Theodore Roethke

There’s an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student’s respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom.

idem

There’s a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.

idem

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.

idem

He who can write well runs the civilization and everyone else does the grunt work.

Kenneth W. Harl

The sexual metaphor is not too distant…

Contemporary society’s…conviction that an enlightened, happy committee of verbose lamebrains is infinitely superior to one struggling, vulnerable and merely dedicated human mind.

Jimmy Webb

…[A]bove all, do no harm.

Hippocrates

The tradition gets taken up — aufgehoben — into the whole personality of the artist and it is for that reason new, rather than novel, by effort of will. There’s a fear that without novelty there is only banality; but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one has ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love. Spiritual texts present the same problem, that they can use only banalities, which mean something totally different from the inside of the experience. Language makes the uncommon common.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff. Mind could not cope with the gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself — withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator.

Erwin Schrödinger

…metaphysicians, both of the official and learnèd type…

idem

This produces the grotesque phenomenon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an unbelievable childlike ed.— adolescent —undeveloped or atrophied— philosophical outlook.

idem

I’m about to stop playing ‘Whom shall I kill first?’ in my head and just go with what feels natural.

Dylan Moran

I’ll talk to him myself. I don’t want any legal fidgey-widgeyness getting in the way of natural justice.

idem

…natural selection is just one, and maybe not even the most fundamental, source of biological order.

Gregory C. Gibson

Opportunity flings itself fruitlessly against a reinforced plexiglass window, over and over.

Isaac Schankler

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

Bruce Springsteen

The reason I’m running for president is because I can’t be Bruce Springsteen.

Barack Obama

When Bruce Springsteen sings on his new album, that’s not ‘fun,’ that’s fucking triumph, man.

Pete Townshend

Anyone who isn’t angry at G—d is a fool.

Bluenote, very Rabbinically, after dear Reb David’s joke, viz., ‘Is there anybody else there?!’

No one person can be a genius.

idem

Anyone who appears to be ratiocinating is actually remembering.

David Curzon; not in the anamnesiac sense, but in the sense of having prepared his argumentation beforehand

You may think you’re the bandleader and you’ve got a great fifteen-piece orchestra and all that, but, if the drummer ain’t happenin’, ain’t nothin’s happenin’.

Count Basie

We human beings are either so much alike, so virtually identical in the inner workings of our emotions that we actually feel the same things in the exact same way — or we are so completely different, even alien to each other, that we have not the slightest inkling of what another feels when he, for instance, pricks himself with a thorn.

Arthur Garfunkel (that is, Unity is metaphysical and difference is material, per Yeats)

The important thing is not to think much, but to love much; and so, do that which best stirs you to love.

Ste Teresa of Ávila

There is no difference in the destination; the only difference is in the journey.

Inayat Khan

Well, Jesus kissed his mother’s hands
Whispered, ‘Mother, still your tears,
For remember the soul of the universe
Willed a world and it appeared.’

Bruce Springsteen

We must be content to remember that he who touches for the first time at a deep hidden truth that is contrary to universally accepted opinion usually overstates it in a way that is likely to involve him in logical contradictions.

Erwin Schrödinger

Scepticism alone is a cheap and barren affair. Scepticism in a man who has come nearer to the truth than anyone before, and yet clearly recognizes the narrow limits of his own mental construction, is great and fruitful, and does not reduce but doubles the value of the discoveries.

idem

Music is the echo from a transcendent harmonious world; it is the sigh of the angel within us. When the word is silent… [A]nd when our mute hearts lie only behind the ribcage of our chest, then it is only through music that men call to each other in their dungeons, and write their distant sighs in their wilderness.

Jean Paul

Confidence is the food of the wise man, but the liquor of the fool.

B. J. Novak

Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.

Mark Twain

My experiences with science led me to God. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?

Wernher von Braun

Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven’s mystery unfolding

Robert W. Service

Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem —for purely religious purposes, of course— to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.

Rudyard Kipling

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

i id="Kipling"dem

It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.

idem

All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people — the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

idem

But he couldn’t lie if you paid him and he’d starve before he stole.

idem

You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it.

idem, Gunga Din

We be of one blood, ye and I.

Kaa; idem

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

idem on the rise of fascism

When your Dæmon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.

idem

[I]t’s always best to tell the truth.

idem

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

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

idem

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.

idem

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

idem

I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

idem

To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.

idem

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

idem

Does nobody understand?

idem; last words

[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.

idem

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

idem

Speak for yourself, Jim, but be glad you can.

Bluenote

Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

idem

Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.

Bruce Springsteen

He who laughs most, learns best.

John Cleese

With giraffes, it really takes one to know one.

David Mitchell

Und soll wie aller Musik also auch des Generalbasses Finis und Endursache anders nicht als nur zu Gottes Ehre und Recreation des Gemütes sein. Wo dieses nicht in acht genommen wird, ists keine eigentliche Musik, sondern ein Teuflisches Geplerr und Geleier.

Like all music, the figured bass should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.

J. S. Bach.

‘Dangerous’ is a retrospective judgement.

Yitzakh Galnoór

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, and this may be formulated as follows: ‘I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live.’

Albert Schweizer

Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge… It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two ‘I’s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further… when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

Erwin Schrödinger

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The ‘I’ is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

idem

The stages of human development are to strive for: one, Besitz, Possession; two, Kennen, Knowledge; three Können, Ability; and four, Sein, Being.

idem

Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make do in each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as ‘real’ or ‘only possible;’ we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this…? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself.

idem

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon Ausweg. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

idem, to Albert Einstein

The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on super imposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.

Walter J. Moore

The gods love what is mysterious, and dislike what is evident.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, alike to ‘hidden structure’s superiority supra

Is Madonna prepared to take on everything else that goes with wearing a crown of thorns?

Anon. Anglican cleric

“...an instance of scientific reason lit up by mysticism in the Church of England...

Anon., on Thomas Browne

…the mistakes of the great, promulgated along with the discoveries of their genius, are apt to work serious havoc.

Erwin Schrödinger

The soul is called the harmony of the body, related to it as are to a musical instrument the sounds it produces.

Philolaus the Pythagorite

Science has now become sophisticated, it has learned to be cautious…and not take for granted an intrinsic cognateness where there may be only a formal analogy, resulting from the very nature of mathematical thought.

Erwin Schrödinger

Xenophanes upheld the only real monotheism that ever existed upon Earth.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

There awaits men when they die such things as they look not for nor dream of.

Heraclitus

It is a great pity that children in the first two years of life cannot talk, for if they could, they would talk Kantian philosophy.

Paul Deussen

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

Werner Heisenberg

Reality is in the observations, not in the electron.

idem

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

idem

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

idem

Thirdly, I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.

Erwin Schrödinger

And we, who are we anyhow? Perhaps we were there already before this creation came into existence, human beings of another type, or even some sort or gods, pure souls and mind united with the whole universe, parts of the intelligible world, not separated as cut off, but at one with the whole.

Plotinus

Form (Gestalt) , not substance, is the fundamental concept. Erwin Schrödinger

Never lose sight of the rôle your particular subject has within the great performance of the tragicomedy of human Life; keep in touch with life — not so much with practical life [though that, too —ed.] as with the ideal background of life, which is ever so much more important; and, Keep Life in touch with you.

idem

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of æstheticism -- Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

Okakura Kakuzo

So, come all you young men, with your wicked, wicked ways. Sow your wild oats in your younger days so that we may be happy when we grow old. Yes! happy and happy when we grow old. For the day’s getting on and the night’s getting long. Darling, please, gimme your arm and we’ll joggle along, yes, we’ll joggle and joggle and joggle along.

Errol Flynn

Love is a phenomenon —like consciousness, like matter, like energy, like space, time, and all great things— that is given to us once only.

Bluenote, expanding on Schrödinger

…closed in itself and yet without boundaries…

Erwin Schrödinger on space; Bluenote on love

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

Wm. Carlos Williams

The normal civilisation is one that rests on principles…everything is…the application and extension of a purely and essentially intellectual and metaphysical doctrine.

René Guénon

Higher degrees of formalization make the statements of science more precise, its inferences more impersonal and correspondingly more ‘reversible;’ but every step towards this ideal is achieved by a progressive sacrifice of content. The immense wealth of of living shapes governed by the descriptive sciences is narrowed down to bare pointer-readings for the purpose of exact sciences, and experience vanishes altogether from our direct sight as we pass on to pure mathematics.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

I bet a funny thing about driving a car off a cliff is, while you’re in midair, you still hit those brakes.

Jack Handey

Booze is the most outrageous of drugs, which is why I chose it.

Peter O’Toole

The nicest buttocks in the world are in Ireland.

idem, on Annie Laurie inter alia, like infra

She’s breasted like the peacock
She’s backèd like the swan
She’s jimp about the middle, me boys
And her waist I may some span
Well, indeed I may
Rum-to-me-diddle, all-the-diddle work-a-day

Wm. Douglas, arranged and set by Bluenote

The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.

Peter O’Toole

Own your own masters.

Frank Sinatra

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.

idem

I am no more humble than my talents require.

Oscar Levant

The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me.

Charles Bradlaugh

Well, defining is whole problem, isn’t it?

Bluenote

[T]he typical Talmudist is a man who through sheer study of the Law has no time to think about God.

The Baal Shem Tov

You see, gin isn’t really a drink per se; it’s more of a mascara thinner.

Dylan Moran

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

I Corinthians 15:26

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Oscar Wilde

A French lady, once enjoying some such ice [frozen Roman punch], is said to have exclaimed, “What a pity that this pleasure is not a sin!” Taste and morality so Parisian can neither need nor merit a comment.

anecdote

A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.

Dr Sam’l Johnson

Belief is a creative passion.

Bluenote, cf. ‘himma’ sup.

There’s only one way to not know God; there’s an infinitude of ways to know God.

idem

If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values, they’re hobbies.

Jon Stewart

I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert… his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband!… to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!

Queen Victoria in her diary on her wedding night

I do not think this country will afford sufficient allurements to the citizens of other States … The children of Irish parents born abroad are sometimes more Irish than the Irish themselves, and they would come with added experience and knowledge to our country…

Patrick Kenny

As Irish people our relationships with the United States and the European Union are complex. Geographically we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin.

Mary Harney

Caldum meiere et frīgidum pōtāre.

The Satyricon of Petronius

Cynicism is only intellectual sloth.

Henry Rollins

They say true love only comes around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then. I have been waiting. I have been searching. I am a man under the moon, walking the streets of earth until dawn. There’s got to be someone for me. It’s not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to. Someone.

idem

It is a characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the familiar.

Bluenote, after McGilchrist and Seneca

It is not blood that makes you Irish but a willingness to be part of the Irish Nation.

Thos. Davis

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Martin Heidegger

Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by ‘facts,’ ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize ‘facts’ never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.

idem

The Geschick of being: a child that plays… Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The ‘because’ withers away in the play. The play is without ‘why.’ It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this ‘simply’ is everything, the one, the only… The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

idem

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.

idem

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

idem, whence Anselm’s ontological proof

Restated less confusingly, the Form ranks higher than the Substance.

Bluenote; also, ‘truth’ than ‘fact’

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today’s literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

Martin Heidegger

Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.

idem

A body can niver bide wi [but]a body’s sel.

Scotch proverb

Thos. Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to ‘subservience and venality,’ and will ‘suffocate the germs of virtue.’ And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles.

Noam Chomsky

The four seasons in Australia consist of fuck it’s hot, Can you believe how fucking hot it is?, I won’t be in today because it is too fucking hot and Yes, the dinner plate size spiders come inside to escape from the heat. That is a fucking whopper though.

David Thorne

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!

Rudyard Kipling

Body and spirit I surrendered whole
To harsh instructors — and received a soul…
If mortal man could change me through and through
From all I was — What may the God not do?

idem

The ultimate aim of all love affairs…is more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

God is Being, not a being.

Bluenote

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Queen Elizabeth II

Tradition must be respected, convention can be broken; but only when you know which is which.

Ollie the Melodeonist

The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.

Dylan Thomas

There may be some generally more masculine qualities —possibly those custom hath commended masculine—, and mutatis mutandis feminine, but in general, diffrences and, indeed, similarities),between any two people, irrespective of biological gender, are far greater and certainly far more important than gross generalizations about men and women; and of course deontologically speaking, it is imperative to understand and ken every person you meet an sich, in herorhimself.

Bluenote

A fool is excited by every word.

Heraclitus

Accept nothing pleasant unless it is beneficial.

Democritus

Accept nothing beneficial unless it is pleasant.

Bluenote

To all humans the same thing is good and true, but different people find different things pleasant and factual.

idem

For if it is unlimited, it will be one. For if there were two, they could not be unlimited, but would have limits against each other.

Melissus of Samos

Tragedy creates a deception in which the deceiver is more just than the non-deceiver and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived.

Gorgias

I may make bold to say that the only religion which agrees with, and even goes a little further than modern researchers, both on physical and moral lines is the Advaita, and that is why it appeals to modern scientists so much. They find that the old dualistic theories are not enough for them, do not satisfy their necessities. A man must have not only faith, but intellectual faith too.

Swami Vivekananda, 1896, presaging Schrödinger

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice ‘at the closing of the day.’ I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

Prof. Geo. E. B. Saintsbury

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

idem

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

idem

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

R. D. Laing

Keep calm and carry on.

English proverb

Listen Men. This is bringing before all the Sons of the Gael, the King and Parliament of Britain have forever abolished the act against the Highland Dress; which came down to the Clans from the beginning of the world to the year 1746. This must bring great joy to every Highland Heart. You are no longer bound down to the unmanly dress of the Lowlander. This is declaring to every Man, young and old, simple and gentle, that they may after this put on and wear the Truis, the Little Kilt, the Coat, and the Striped Hose, as also the Belted Plaid, without fear of the Law of the Realm or the spite of the enemies.

The Repelation of the Act of Proscription

If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet.

W. B. Yeats

The only source of error greater than the pursuit of absolute Truth is the abandonment of the pursuit of absolute Truth.

Bluenote

The only thing better than physical, corporeal, human existence can only occur in conjunction and congruence with such, and that is metaphysical, spiritual and Divine existence — the meal cannot be enjoyed without its complementary pleasures afterward, and vice versa.

idem

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light.

Alexander Pope

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

John Maynard Keynes

If Mr Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr Edgar Allen Poe directed by Mr Roger Corman, it would not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

Quentin Crisp

So this was my… it was my big, my big invitation to my audience, to myself — chuckles — to uh… anybody who was interested. Uh… my invitation to a long and earthly, very earthly journey. Hopefully in the company of uh, someone you love, people you love, and in search of a home you can feel a part of. Good luck and good evening.’

Bruce Springsteen

The same lesson of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.

G. K. Chesterton

Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), ‘All chairs are quite different’, he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them ‘all chairs.’

idem; cf. ‘talent’ and ‘genius’ supra, and the essential vs the sciolistic, form vs figure

All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane.

idem

Not all that is thought should be said. Not all that is said should be written. Not all that is written should be published. Not all that is published should be read.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

Science teachers and the mentally ill; that’s all jazz is for.

Vince Noir

All right then, I’ll say it: Dante makes me sick.

Lope de Vega, last words

The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.

John Jay

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

Thos. Jefferson

When juries refuse to convict on the basis of what they think are unjust laws, they are performing their duty as jurors.

Jack B. Weinstein

If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and a right that once was the citizen’s safeguard of liberty.

George Bancroft

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

Émile Durkheim (nary a mention of G–d anywhere)

When I meet God, I will ask him two questions. Why relativity? And why turbulence? And I really believe he will have the answer to the first.

Werner Heisenberg

One day Nasruddin went to his neighbour and asked to borrow his largest cauldron, saying he had a lot of friends coming to dinner and he didn’t have a pot large enough. The neighbour reluctantly agreed, saying that Nasruddin must return the cauldron within two days. The mullah said he would.

Sure enough, after two days Nasruddin brought the pot back and gave it to the neighbour. Inside was another much smaller pot. ‘What’s this?’ asked the man. ‘My friend,’ replied Nasruddin. ‘Good news. While your pot was with me it gave birth to a baby. Congratulations!’

Nasruddin left and the man shook his head and shut the door. A few weeks later, Nasruddin went again to borrow his neighbour’s cauldron. The man readily agreed and said, ‘Keep it as long as you need to.’ Nasruddin thanked him and went off.

Days passed. Weeks passed. The pot did not return. Finally, the neighbour lost patience and went to Nasruddin’s house to demand his cauldron. ‘My friend,’ said Nasruddin. ‘Bad news. While it was with me, your cauldron took sick and died. I am so sorry.’

anecdote

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

Ogden Nash

…a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.

C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

idem

It did not last: the Devil howling, ‘Ho!
Let Einstein be!’ restored the status quo.

Sir John Squire, after the Pope supra

Amateurs worry about tactics.
Dilettantes worry about strategy.
Professionals worry about logistics.

Anon.

Therefore, the pure righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom.

Abraham Isaac Kook, Arpilei Tohar

People only believe in fools’ gold because real gold exists.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

You see we’re all looking for someone simpatico. The media portrays life as a rat race, competing to get to the top. Trumpeting our triumphs and keeping others beneath us. But that’s not how life really is. We want to be close. Sure, it’s nice to get the accolades, but they don’t mean much if you’ve got no one to share them with.
And it really only takes one. A single person who sees the planet the same way. Who can laugh at what you do, see the absurdity of life, but has passion for it too.

Bob Lefsetz, again under the heading ‘even a stopped clock and a German…’

They say the odds are improbable
What do they know
For in romance
All true love needs is a chance.

Stevie Wonder

Cheap, Fast, Good - pick two.

American proverb

The only insurance I don’t have is against insurance salesmen!

Captain Haddock

Like likes to like like.

Bluenote

Whenever music is discussed as an independent art, it should always be referred to as instrumental music which, refusing the aid of any other art, expresses the unique essence of art that can only be recognized in it. It is the most romantic of all arts, one would almost want to say, the only truly romantic one. Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld. Music opens to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the outer sensual world that surrounds him, a realm in which he leaves behind all of his feelings of certainty, in order to abandon himself to an unspeakable longing.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

Martyrdom is sweet, but the honey melon of Aqcha is no less sweet.

Uzbek proverb

Clearly, some scholars may find these metaphors inappropriate but perhaps we should not ignore what they refer to only because it is unquantifiable. Lack of measurability should not automatically result in ignoring.

Ghil’ad Zuckermann

…[W]e ‘preserve’ folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

Ananada K. Coomaraswamy

Bluenote’s Corollary to Ockham’s Razor:
Do not create more problems than you solve.

Bluenote

…[I]t is only to one who can say, ‘I am the Light, Thyself,’ that the answer is given, ‘Enter Thou, for what Thou art I am, and what I am Thou art.’

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy quoting the Jaminīya Upaniśaid Brāhmańa

Everything changes; nothing is lost.

Ovid

Measure not by the scale of perfection the meager product of reality.

Friedrich von Schiller

The ability to sustain thought has been lost. Even should we find the necessary leisure and inclination, who would listen? However solitary such pursuits may have appeared historically, there was always before an implied communication — if not immediate, then some time. That no longer obtains. Even those who listen now listen for a different sound. The curve of complexity descends. This sorry truth has been obscured by a simultaneous increase in density. The resultant randomness implies complexity, but it is not the old complexity. The definition between chaos and order has been lost. As long as the result appears the same, it is presumed to be the same. But every step away from artifice is a step toward chaos. That all creation is artifice is not the issue, willed artifice is. There is a connection here with Saintsbury’s feeling for the primacy of style.

Kweyeduck Marmelstein

‘Never’ is a black word. But yes, in the ‘never’ of conversation which means ‘not very often,’ I do think it.

Jane Austen

God be with trewth qwer he be;
I wolde he were in this cuntre.

Anon., XV C.

They came and told one of the more recent Dukes of Devonshire that in the interests of economy and general modern-mindedness Chatsworth really ought to dispense with one of the pastry chefs. ‘What,’ cried the Duke, aghast, ‘Is a man no longer to be allowed his biscuit?’

Alexander Cockburn

The world is not wont to search the most generous of the possible impulses to a dubious action…Yet whatever the world’s cynic practice, there can be no question that for the purposes of understanding any human problem, it is safer to risk the more generous interpretation. We shall be surer at least of seeing the man as he saw himself.

Helen C. White

I would rather be a bright leaf on the stream of a dying civilization than a fertile seed planted in the soil of a new era.

Lucius Beebe

But desh it oll, some of us dein’t heve a chice!

Bluenote

Ancient salt is best packing.

W. B. Yeats

Jew is a trademark, like ‘Wheaties.’

Ivan Passer

G–d: So should it be that you would forsake me, but would keep my Torah.

the Talmud

If theories of environmental influence are correct, I am astonished genius does not have horns with which to defend itself.

Arthur Cravan

I am going to begin with a poem of mine called ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ because if you know anything about me you will expect me to begin with it.

W. B. Yeats

In the sudden coolness of the dying day, I enjoyed the supple, ambling gait of my she-camel. This gait —both right legs advance together, shifting the animal’s full weight to the left, then both left legs, shifting the body’s weight to the right— is peculiar to camels, lions, and elephants. It favors metaphysical speculation, whereas the diagonal motion of horses and dogs inspires only indigent thoughts and sordid calculations.

Michel Tournier

Legends live on our substance. They derive their truth from the complicity of our hearts. If we cannot recognize our own story in them, they are dead wood and dry straw.

idem

When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…

James Joyce

God made food the devil cooks.

idem

Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi.
If you wish me to weep, you yourself must grieve first.

Horace

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Ortega y Gasset

Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.

Charles Dickens; ‘or yet to come’

PROPOSITION XI. God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.
PROPOSITION XV. Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
PROPOSITION XVII. God acts solely by the laws of his own nature and is not constrained by anyone.
PROPOSITION XVIII. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
PROPOSITION XIX. God and all the attributes of God are eternal.
PROPOSITION XXX. Intellect, in function finite, or in function infinite, must comprehend the attributes of God and the modifications of God, and nothing else.

Benedict Spinoza

This said, like enlightenment and entropy, aerogel is a state function — it doesn’t matter how you get there but just that you do.

Stephen Steiner; aerogel.org

Do not kill time, for it will surely kill thee.

Sundial motto

If you are in a pub and accidentally knock a person’s drink over or bump into them and cause a spillage, it is both customary and polite to buy him another one — or at least offer to do so. Failing to do so may aggravate the average Australian bar patron and possibly cause them to respond aggressively toward you.

Anon.

The most terrifying image is a clown in the night.

Boris Karloff

Roosevelt, more than any other living man…showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God — he was pure act.

Henry Adams

Heaven forbid that any man in Israel ever disputed that Song of Songs is holy. For the whole world is not worth the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy and Song of Songs is holy of holies.

Rabbi Akiva

There is the old story about the market craze in sardine trading when the sardines disappeared from their traditional waters in Monterey, California. The commodity traders bid them up and the price of a can of sardines soared. One day a buyer decided to treat himself to an expensive meal and actually opened a can and started eating. He immediately became ill and told the seller the sardines were no good. The seller said, ‘You don’t understand. These are not eating sardines, they are trading sardines!’

anecdote

‘Taffy dear, I’m afraid we’re in for a little trouble,’ said her Daddy, and put his arm round her, so she didn’t care.

Rudyard Kipling, Just-So Stories

…[C]ountries which, like the United States, have set up a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will long have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.

Ernest Renan

The old bard Magroupy, when asked if a great poet could be a mass murderer, answered back, ‘Could a pine tree be a microwave oven?’

related by Douglas Halebi Blake

There is no past we can bring back simply by longing for it. There is only the eternally new that builds and creates itself out of the past as the past withdraws.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

When we first started, they basically went John and Paul’s way because they were the writers and they would say, ‘This is the song,’ and I would play as creatively as I could. Sometimes I would have three people telling me how to do it. They were saying play it this like on that track. I’m saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, there are two drummers there.’ They could never hear that, you know. You’d have to have four arms to do half the stuff they wanted me to do.

Ringo Starr

Anyone who feels that the sun and stars and galaxies could have been spawned out of the mathematically demonstrated instabilities in Nothing hasn’t understood the question.

Raymond Tallis

Antisthenes the Cynic, unable to answer Zeno’s arguments against the reality of motion, got up and walked away, deeming a proof by action more potent than any logical confutation.

Elias

Hic Rhodus; salta hic!

Æsop

We may be near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

Novalis

I know that there is nothing to believe.
vs
I believe that there is something to know.

Bluenote, paraphrasing McGilchrist

Bellamists subscribe to a belief in the absolute purity and oneness of all things Bellamy, and bleat daily incantations in the hope of advancing the day when he will finally return to reign in ever-lasting glory.

Jon Boden

Truth is never simple. Fact is often simple, but fact is often not true.

Bluenote, using truth not in the absolute sense, but in a ‘sophisticated’ (łäk) sense

An Englishman wants to buy a train ticket at a German railway station. So he goes to the ticket counter and says: ‘Two to Toulouse!’ to which the German railway official replies: ‘Täterätä!’

anecdote

Psychological reality is no less real for not being reducible to physical reality.

Raymond Tallis

Call no man happy until he is dead.

Æschylus, The Agamemmnon

Hony soŷt quy mal y pense. Shame to him who evil think’th.

Anglo-Norman proverb

The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author.

Benjamin Franklin’s self-written epitaph

Great books read us.

W. H. Auden

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

E. M. Forster

And when I meet with frantic folk who sinfully declare
There is no pardon for their sin, the same I will not spare
Till I have proved that Heaven and Hell, which in our hearts we have
Shew nothing irredeemable on either aside the grave
And as we live and as we die —if utter Death there be—
The people, Lord, thy people, are good enough for me!

Rudyard Kipling, A Pilgrim’s Way

Thig crioch air an t-saoghal ach mairidh ceol agus gaol. The world will come to an end, but music and love will endure.

Irish proverb

‘Do you say no worthy wife is to be found among all these crowds?’ Well, let her be handsome, charming, rich and fertile; let her have ancient ancestors ranged about her halls; let her be more chaste than all the dishevelled Sabine maidens who stopped the war — a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan!

Juvenal

You shall love your crooked neighbor
With all your crooked heart

W. H. Auden

Does a woman who marries without love look on a man as I look on you?

Princess Flavia; The Prisoner of Zenda

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.

Robert Frost

Why subjective experience emerges from appropriate neural activities may be no more answerable than similar questions about other fundamental phænomena… Why do masses exhibit gravitational attraction? Fundamental physical phænomena are not reducible or explainable. We simply accept these as ‘given’ in the nature of things [cf. Heidegger’s musing in the ‘Geschick of being’] . We can only study how these manifestations affect, interact, and control what goes in in the physical world. We may thus regard conscious subjective experience as another unique fundamental property in nature.

Benjamin Libet

People who do not agree with determinism are usually viewed with suspicion by rationalists who are afraid that if we accept indeterminism, we may be committed to accepting the doctrine of Free Will, and may thus become involved in theological arguments about the Soul and Divine Grace. I usually avoid talking about free will, because I am not clear enough about what it means, and I even suspect that our intuition of a free will may mislead us. Nevertheless, I think that determinism is a theory which is untenable on many grounds… Indeed, I think it is important for us to get rid of the determinist element in the rationalist tradition.

Karl Popper; consider that there might be something deeper than freedom of the will, just as there is some deeper —I daresay ithely— nature of wave-particles

Logical relationships…do not belong to the physical world. They are abstractions (perhaps ‘products of the mind’). But my realization of an inconsistency may lead me to act, in the physical world… If we act through being influenced by the grasp of an abstract relationship, we initiate physical causal chains which have no sufficient physical causal antecedents. We are ‘first movers,’ or creators of a physical ‘causal chain’: ergo Deus factus sum. The fear of obscurantism (or of being judged an obscurantist) has prevented most anti-obscurantists from saying such things as these. But this fear has produced, in the end, only obscurantism of another kind.

idem

[I] marvel at the haiku, for it forms images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves.

Andrzej Tarkowsky; cf. existential vs. referential significance

And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Dorothy Parker

Awls feckened in their naughtiness; the pegs and knolls, made by the sweatherysweavery brown now all hummy like the first po-connered hum, like the hummy the furstin urvather hum, hollowed inishnum, tiddlyhum by the blousebozzing ramparted slickeriness, pearlous lifethat hummously becomes the hummertiddlying by the closesblack and the blosecrackt (uppen aback to dowsnle the fround), hummed tiddling through bachgen anhomme!

Bluenote, with regrets to Dot Parker, Messrs Yeats and Thos., and the Maestro

Those who slaughter men shall kiss calves.

Hosea

More than any other religion, Hinduism hangs upon the concept of wholeness, and the perception of wholeness to the Hindu mind is the most joyous of all human experiences.

Edmond Taylor

Do not cross the threshold.

The Kama Sutra, on proper behavior in educing —and granting— clemency

Good cop/bad cop means there’s two bad cops.

Bernie Brillstein

I cannot help laughing at the æsthetical folks, who torment themselves in endeavoring, by some abstract words, to reduce to a conception that inexpressible thing to which we give the name of beauty. Beauty is a primeval phenomenon [Urphänomen], which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature itself.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

Being faithful is like being a virgin or pregnant or dead or standing in WH Smith’s in Dorking: you either are or you aren’t.

Reggie Perrin

The following must be apparent — there is but One who is absolutely by and through Itself; namely, God. And God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but It is in Itself pure Life. It can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for Its Being contains within it all Its Being and all possible Being, and neither within It nor out of It can any new Being arise.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

And when I’m left at home, I’m all alone
But I’d rather be alone with you.

Lisa Loeb

A Jew on horseback is no Jew at all; he is a cossack like all the rest.

Isaac Babel

Le monde moderne avilit.

Charles Péguy

The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.

idem

Homer is new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, is so old and tired as today’s newspaper.

idem

It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.

idem

How maddening, says God, it will be when there are no longer any Frenchmen.

idem

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

idem

[W]hile emotions and feelings can cause havoc in the processes of reasoning…the absence of emotion and feeling is no less damaging. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that feelings are typically indispensable for rational decisions. The passions…have a say on how the rest of the brain and cognition go about their business. Their influence is immense…[providing] a frame of reference — as opposed to Descartes’ error…the Cartesian idea of a disembodied mind.

Antonio Damasio

It takes a really great drummer to improve on no drummer at all.

Chet Baker

Toutes les beautés contiennent, comme tous les phénomènes possibles, quelque chose d’éternel et quelque chose de transitoire — d’absolu et de particulier.
All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.

Charles Baudelaire

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.

idem

One Russian is an anarchist. Two Russians are a chess game. Three Russians are a revolution. Four Russians are the Budapest String Quartet.

Jascha Heifetz

Richard: He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.
Geoffrey: My, you chivalric fool…as if the way one fell down mattered.
Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters a great deal.

The Lion in Winter

In gemstones the whole majesty of nature is encompassed in a minute space…a single one sufficeth to demonstrate the whole excellence of creation.

Pliny the Elder

[T]he essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

Erwin Schrödinger

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.

James Russell Lowell

Life is no way to treat an animal.

Kurt Vonnegut

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Charles Darwin (modus tollens)

If you are holding a sapling in your hand and someone tells you, ‘Come quickly, the messiah is here!’, first finish planting the tree and then go to greet the messiah.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai

We never love philosophy so much as when she is showing us what a poor hand she has to play, and our psychoanalysts twice that.

Bluenote after Montaigne

Nature is not what we heard Bolingbroke call ‘the whole system of God’s works as far as…[are] open to us’; nor is it Bacon’s ‘created things.’ It is a principle, seized by the mind a priori, but confirmed inductively. A ‘cause.’ The cause of the manifold of the perceptible world around us. Not in antithesis to man, but in corollary to man.

Charles Scott, Sir Sherrington

The physician resorts to God through Nature.

idem, after Jean Fernel

I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man’s Cellini or a road company Cosimo de’ Medici…the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist.

Lucius Beebe

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

Anton Chekhoff

One day, one time, there was in old Persia a cruel vizier, very vain, and very proud. He offered a reward —his weight in gold— to any man who could tell which of his eyes was glass. Immediately the lowliest of his servant’s page boys spoke up, and said, ‘Please, my noble Vizier, it is your left that is of glass.’ The vizier was astonished; no one but he and his long-dead childhood physician knew. ‘You shall have your reward, boy, but tell me — how did you know?’ The boy replied simply, ‘It was the one with pity in it.’

anecdote

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.

Blaise Pascal

We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The interior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult.

Wm. Blackstone, on legal fictions

Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life.

James Clavell, Shōgun

He gives twice who gives quickly.

Italian proverb

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.

Anton Chekhoff

Wo Rätsel mich zu neuen Rätseln führten
Da wußten sie die Wahrheit ganz genau. Where riddles led me on to further riddles
To them the truth was quite precisely known.

Grillparzer

To grasp the basis of phænomena through logical thought may in all probability be impossible, since logical thought is itself a part of phænomena, and wholly involved in them; and we may ask ourselves whether, in that case, we are obliged to deny ourselves the use of an allegorical [metaphorous] picture of the situation, merely on the grounds that it cannot be strictly proved.

Erwin Schrödinger

We may fairly safely venture the generalization that civilization kills cat’s cradles.

the Museum of Jurassic Technology

Learn the rules that you might break them justly.

Tenzing Gyatso

This will be our reply to violence: to play music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein

[I] may hope that future centuries may bring fulfilment to my yearnings of centuries ago.

Erwin Schrödinger

Johnson wrote, ‘Oats, a food usually reserved for horses in England, in Scotland supports the people.’ Boswell replied, Johnson safely dead, ‘Aye; which is why in England ye raise fine horses, when in Scotland we raise fine people.’

anecdote

If a nation has a hero, it will be safe.

Kazakh proverb

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but … let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.

Immanuel Kant, the so-called ‘death certificate’

The one all-highest Godhead
Subsisting in each being
And living when they perish —
Who this has seen, is seeing.
For he who has that highest God in all things found
That man will of himself upon himself inflict no wound

quoted from memory by Schrödinger from the Bhagavad Gita or the Vedantas or something

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

—You are the dearest, sweetest, most wonderful person.
(tenebræ responsories)
—There used to be a time when that was enough.

Elaine Nardo and Jim Ignatowski, from Barry Kemp

Many of us get to heaven by backing away from hell.

Anon., quoted by Mariette Hartley

A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and in his own house.

Matthew 13:57

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?

Paul Newman on negative constancy

No society can go from the primeval directly to an industrial state without losing the leavening that time and an agricultural period allow.

Albert Schweitzer

A person isn’t who he his during the last conversation you had with him — he’s who he’s been throughout your whole relationship.

Rainier Maria Rilke

…(the proofs of death are statistics
and everyone runs the risk
of being the first immortal)…

Jorge Luis Borges

The first ape who became a man thus committed treason against his own kind.

Mikhail Turovsky

Broken wings fit more easily in standard-size boxes.

idem

Now the Rubicon peacefully flows into the Styx.

idem

A ship’s captain writes in the ship’s log, ‘Today the first mate was drunk.’ The mate complains to the captain that this will ruin his career, and asks him to remove the entry. The captain says, ‘No, it’s true. I shan’t remove it.’

Matey goes away and thinks what he can do. The next time he’s on duty in the captain’s absence, he writes in the ship’s log, ‘Today the captain was sober.’

anecdote

[T]he fanatical atheists…are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who —in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’— cannot bear the music of the spheres.

Albert Einstein

Hear O Israel, the Eternal is our G–d and He is one!

the Shema Yisroel

If we’ve done anything good, its another triumph for Great Britain. If we haven’t, it’s England loses again.

Flanders and Swann

I think, if you haven’t at some point tried to make a dog drunk, you’re not noble.

John Bishop

Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.

Thos. Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

Not everything is possible in every age.

Hegel?

Watermelon; it’s a gooda fruit. You eat, you drink, you washa you face.

Enrico Caruso

The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls
And sigh’d his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.

Wm. Shakespeare; The Merchant of Venice

You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

The Doctor Zhivago of Pasternak

If math is not a lot of bunk, then no claim of the form ‘X can’t be proved’ can be proved.

Gødel’s Theorem as formulated in words of one syllable by George Boolos

Monism is the theory that anything less than everything is nothing.

Saul Gorn

—Max Planck and Zeno of Elea once got into into a huge bar brawl over a very small matter. Who won?
—Planck, but not by much.

anecdote

The man that hath no music in him
Is fit for treason, strategems and spoils.

Wm. Shakespeare

Veritas sæpe in joculo.

Anon.

Wer sondern einen Menschen rettet, rettet auch der ganze Welt.Whoever saves one life, saves all the World.

the Mishnah; Sanhedrin 4:5

Coming from a second lieutenant, that’s almost ironic!

Francis the Talking Mule

If there be rags enough he will know her name
And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,
Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

Her Praise; W. B. Yeats

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Shakespeare; Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii

For whithersoever thou goest, I will go, and where thou dwellest, I will dwell together with thee; thy people is my people, and thy God is my God; what land shall receive thee dying, I shall die therein also, and there I shall take place of burying; yea, God do to me these terrible things, and add more also, if aught but death alone part me fro thee.

Ruth 1:16-17

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’

Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

Sara Tansey in The Playboy of the Western World

Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets, when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets? O sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murderin’ hate, an’ give us – give us Thine own – Thine own eternal love!

Seán Ó Casey; Juno and the Paycock

He who was my companion through adventure and hardship is gone forever.

Gilgamesh of Uruk, on Enkidu

Method actors give you a photograph. Real actors give you an oil painting.

Charles Laughton

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Abraham Maslow

Everything that reaches our senses comes from the past.

James Gleick, The New York Review of Books

A Man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it to every one that does not know how to think out of his Profession and particular way of Life.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 171

Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel — Art.

Herman Melville, Timoleon

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Thos. Hardy, personal notebooks

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh, no, it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wand’ring barque
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with is brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to th’ edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

WmShakespeare, Old 116

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Tancredi Corbera, Il Gattopardo, or perhaps the Reverend Jim Ignatowski, Taxi

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine.

Theodore Bikel

I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.

Abraham Lincoln

Auto Focus gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn’t sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity … there is a severe, powerful moralism lurking beneath the film’s dispassionate matter-of-factness. Mr. Schrader is indifferent to the sinner, but he cannot contain his loathing of the sin, which is not so much sex as the fascination with images … To argue that images can corrupt the flesh and hollow out the soul is, for a filmmaker, an obviously contradictory exercise, but not necessarily a hypocritical one. There is plenty of nudity in Auto Focus, but you can always glimpse the abyss behind the undulating bodies, and the director leads you from easy titillation to suffocating dread, pausing only briefly and cautiously to consider the possibility of pleasure.

A. O. Scott

We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us which is in no way to imply that the rotten little beggars can’t be a royal pain on occasion.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

…to cleanse them o’ Papery, and idolatry, and image worship, and surplices, and sic like rags o’ the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end.

Andrew Fairservice on St Andrews; Rob Roy, Sir Walter Scott

Non deve fermarsi l’huomo in una sola cosa, perchè allora divien matto: bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa.Man is not for but a single thing; it will only drive him mad. He has need for a thousand things, a tumult in his head.

advice received by Johann Wolfgang von Göthe, 1786

Como è somma sapienza essere reputato pazzo per l’amor.That is the highest wisdom; to be thought mad for love.

Jacopone da Todi

[T]he modern proclaims an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility.

G. K. Chesterton

The most interesting thing, to me, was the anecdote related by Leys at the end of his account, about sitting in an Australian café minding his own business while a radio is blaring musical and spoken pap in the background. By chance, the program switched to a Mozart clarinet quintet, for a moment turning the café ‘into an antechamber of Paradise.’ People fell silent, there were looks of bafflement, and then, ‘to the huge relief of all,’ one customer ‘stood up, walked straight to the radio,’ turned the knob to another station, and ‘restored at once the more congenial noises, which everyone could again comfortably ignore.’

Leys describes this event as a kind of epiphany. He is sure that philistinism does not result from the lack of knowledge. The customer who could not abide hearing Mozart’s music recognized its beauty. Indeed, he did what he did precisely for that reason. The desire to destroy beauty, according to Leys, applies not just to aesthetics but as much, if not more, to ethics: ‘The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books , August 15, 2013

There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems.

Steven Pinker

…nor, fortunately, that creates them.

Bluenote, with an unspoken ‘…right? Right, guys?’ necessarily appended

The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.

James Beard

If a person’s scale of values is based primarily on material wealth, that person will be in difficulty all of his or her life. Do not pay much attention to fame, power and money. Some day you will meet a person who cares for none of these, and then you will know how poor you are.

Rudyard Kipling

Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.

Louis MacNeice

Forced already in my 28th year to become a philosopher, O it is not easy, less easy for the artist than for anyone else - Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good live therein. O men, when some day you read these words, reflect that you did me wrong and let the unfortunate one comfort himself and find one of his kind who despite all obstacles of nature yet did all that was in his power to be accepted among worthy artists and men.

Ludwig van Beethoven

…[S]he had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck…

The Dover Bitch; Anthony Hecht

I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.

The Queen Consort Elizabeth

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

J. B. S. Haldane

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.

idem

[I]t is only gradually, as we learn from prehistory and history, that man sorts out the not-really-sensitive from the alive, and if, like Descartes, he considers himself exceptionally clever, he even goes a trifle too far.

Erwin Schrödinger

Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.

Wm. Butler, on the strawberry

I think I'll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up — it always does in the end.

Luna Lovegood

At that moment I say truly that the vital spirit, that which lives in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble so violently that I felt it fiercely in the least pulsation, and, trembling, it uttered these words: ‘Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi: Behold a god more powerful than I, who, coming, will rule over me.’ At that moment the animal spirit, that which lives in the high chamber to which all the spirits of the senses carry their perceptions, began to wonder deeply at it, and, speaking especially to the spirit of sight, spoke these words: ‘Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra: Now your blessedness appears.’ At that moment the natural spirit, that which lives in the part where our food is delivered, began to weep, and weeping said these words: ‘Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps! Alas, misery, since I will often be troubled from now on!’

Dante, La Vita Nuova

Primum non nocere.

Hippocrates

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense?

Beatrix Potter

If you bring forth what is within you, that which you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, that which you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Jesus of Nazareth; the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.

David Letterman to Bill O’Reilly

Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Andrzej Tarkowskij

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

idem

A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God’s incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.

Ben Hecht

He’s different from other boys. He’s looking for causes, not effects.

Nancy Edison, ‘Young Tom Edison’

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

If God should turn from truth, I would turn from God.

Meister Eckhart

I’ve been called worse things by better people.

Pierre Trudeau, after an insult from Richard Nixon

The line must be drawn here.

Patrick Stewart

There is no reason to beat up a woman.

idem

Her buns are the best.

idem

Great style is insouciance — it is very vulgar to be impressed by your own clothes.

Hardy Amies

Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Epictetus

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

Errol Flynn

What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt
A dapper boot
A little hand
If half the little soul is dirt?

Afred, Lord Tennyson

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Shakespeare, Portia, The Merchant of Venice

My brother’s breakaway from Catholicism was due to other motives. He felt it was imperative that he should save his real spiritual life from being overlaid and crushed by a false one that he had outgrown. He believed that poets in the measure of their gifts and personality were the repositories of the genuine spiritual life of their race and the priests were usurpers. He detested falsity and believed in individual freedom more thoroughly than any man I have ever known.

The interest that my brother always retained in the philosophy of the Catholic Church sprang from the fact that he considered Catholic philosophy to be the most coherent attempt to establish such an intellectual and material stability.

Stanislaus Joyce

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

James Joyce, interviewed by Max Eastman, who noted, ‘He smiled as he said that — smiled, and then repeated it.'

A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.

The Catcher in the Rye

I'll sing you one, Ho
Green grow the rushes, Ho
What is your one, Ho?
One is one and all is one
And evermore shall be it so.

Irish folk song

When one travelled in the East, it was astonishing how often one came across men who had modelled themselves on the creatures of his imagination.

W. Somerset Maugham on Kipling

Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.

F. Henry Royce

El Estado es impersonal: el argentino sólo concibe una relación personal. Por eso, para él, robar dineros públicos no es un crimen. Compruebo un hecho; lo justifico o excuso.

Jorge Luis Borges

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

W. Somerset Maugham

The tragedy of love is indifference.

idem; The Trembling of a Leaf

I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked … it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.

idem, The Moon and Sixpence

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes…

idem, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.

idem, A Writer’s Notebook

I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

idem; Sheppey

Leges sine moribus vanae.

Motto of Penn

What’s the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you’re loved again.
What’s the best thing in the world?
—Something out of it, I think.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

…and when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, VIe Sonnet from the Portuguese

If a cut were made through a cone parallel to its base, how should we conceive of the two opposing surfaces which the cut has produced - as equal or as unequal? If they are unequal, that would imply that a cone is composed of many breaks and protrusions like steps. On the other hand if they are equal, that would imply that two adjacent intersecting planes are equal, which would mean that the cone, being made up of equal rather than unequal circles, must have the same appearance as a cylinder; which is utterly absurd.

Democritus

[I]mmediate experiences in themselves, however various and disparate they be, are logically incapable of contradicting each other.

Erwin Schrödinger

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt di e.

Donne

Till nevernever may our farce be phoenished!

Guess who.

I’m for decency — period. I’m for anything and everything that bodes love and consideration for my fellow man. But when lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday — cash me out.

Frank Sinatra

For years I’ve nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin’ redheaded broad … but I could never find me a double hammock.

idem

The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.

idem

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

Anon.

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

Albert Einstein

He that has no fools, knaves, nor beggars in his family, was begot by a flash of lightning.

Thos. Fuller

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.

Anon.

A dog is a dog except when he is facing you. Then he is Mr. Dog.

Haïtian proverb

All the dogs in Trinidad used to bite me, too, you see.

Constable Gladstone

Until you know that life is interesting —and find it so— you haven’t found your soul.

Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher

A true man hates no one.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot.

Alexander Pope

You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.

Anon.

Not all those who wander are lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien

You can observe a lot just by watching.

Yogi Berra

Amor, Deus et Pactum Nostrum.

My motto

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

James Joyce; Araby

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Dr Johnson, oft quoted by Dominic Behan

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address

He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved.

Rudyard Kipling; Kim

To Him the Way, the Law, apart.
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda’s Lord, the Bodhisat.

ibid.

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight.

Berthold Brecht; the last verse

Ja, Scheiden und Meiden tut Weh, tut Weh!
Scheiden und Meiden tut Weh!

Gustav Mahler

There’s nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster.

Dr Evil, inter alia

Lies are usually caused by undue fear of men.

Chasidic proverb

Our revenge shall be the sound of our children’s laughter.

Bobby Sands

Never close your lips to whom you have opened your heart.

Baci wrapper

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
      In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
      I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
           Time held me green and dying
      Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas

Schopenhauer is so far from being a real pessimist that at the most he represents ‘the interesting': in a certain sense he makes asceticism interesting—the most dangerous thing possible for a pleasure-seeking age which will be harmed more than ever by distilling pleasure even out of asceticism… is by studying asceticism in a completely impersonal way, by assigning it a place in the system.

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world — and at peace with myself.

Nelson Mandela

If anybody ever tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can’t understand it, take it from me: it’s all balls.

R. J. Mitchell

People who make no noise are dangerous.

Jean de la Fontaine

A man dies too young if he leaves any wine in his cellar.

André Simon

I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela.

Rudyard Kipling; Kim

I will describe me in a word: We. (We joice Our Bonding.)

Bluenote

Breakdowns come, and breakdowns go
What are you gonna do about it?
That’s what I'd like to know

Paul Simon

The landscape at its finest possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superificially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality…best summed up by the therm ‘greatness’.

Kazuo Ishiguro on Britain

I would teach children music, physics and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning.

Plato

I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

Pete Seeger

Ou quand le Préraphaélisme rencontre les rubriques old et amateur de youporn? Oh ça va hein...:

Anon., on a Vivienne Westwood photo shoot

Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.

idem

At Christmas I no more desire a rose than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth.

Wm. Shakesepare, Biron, Love’s Labour’s Lost

When you hear the soft harmonies of the various singers, some taking high and others low parts, some singing in advance, some following in the rear, others with pauses and interludes, you would think yourself listening to a concert of sirens rather than men, and wonder at the powers of voices … whatever is most tuneful among birds, could not equal. Such is the facility of running up and down the scale; so wonderful the shortening or multiplying of notes, the repetition of the phrases, or their emphatic utterance: the treble and shrill notes are so mingled with tenor and bass, that the ears lost their power of judging. When this goes to excess it is more fitted to excite lust than devotion; but if it is kept in the limits of moderation, it drives away care from the soul and the solicitudes of life, confers joy and peace and exultation in God, and transports the soul to the society of angels.

John of Salisbury on Perotin

The man who has never heard the ‘Keel Row’ rising high and shrill above the sound of the regiment…has something yet to hear and understand.

Rudyard Kipling

Lutèce is like McDonald’s.

Paul Gurian

In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance… The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.

B. H. Liddel Hart

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believes with me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believes in me shall never die.

John 11:25-26

We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make the equal halves of something whole.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

Saul Bellow

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It’s like an Easter Egg hunt.

idem

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings — about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes — and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

idem

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler’s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

idem

The message of the ghotul – that youth must be served, that freedom and happiness are more to be treasured than any material gain, that friendliness and sympathy, hospitality and unity are of the first importance, and above all that human love – and its physical expression – is beautiful, clean and precious, is typically Indian.

Verrier Elwin

Quat schuld I wonde?
Of destinés derf and dere
What may mon do bot fonde?

Anon. Middle English; Sir Gawain

Magic people, as all well read children know, are especially susceptible to mortal danger…

David Attenborough on Gerry Durrell

It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state…

James Clerk Maxwell

Thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

idem, Beyond Good and Evil

There has been one life since Christ’s which is at all comparable to his: Galahad. For the exact same preordination and yet constant uncertainty prevail throughout each. That Galahad attained the Grail without his own crucifixion is perhaps more significant of his times than any difference between him and Christ. I only wish it were then possible to say that Galahad’s task had been easier.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

Аппетит приходит во время еды. Appetite comes with eating.

Russian proverb

Epistula non erubescit. A letter does not blush.

Cicero; Letters to Family

O wha’s like my Johnnie,
Sae leish, sae blithe, sae bonnie?
He’s foremost ‘mang the mony
Keel lads o’ coaly Tyne;
He'll set or row sae tightly
Or, in the dance sae sprightly,
He'll cut and shuffle slightly,
'Tis true, were he nae mine.

The Keel Row

In the mystic traditions of the different religions we have a remarkable unity of spirit. Whatever religion they may profess, they are spiritual kinsmen. While the different religions in their historic forms bind us to limited groups and militate against the development of loyalty to the world community, the mystics have already stood for the fellowship of humanity in harmony with the spirit of the mystics of ages gone by.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

A woman had no trouble, so she bought a piglet.

Russian proverb

Один сын — не сын, два сына — полсына, три сына — сын.One son is not a son, two sons are half a son, three sons are a son.

idem

I think my own desire to be loved is what makes me sexually attractive.

Dudley Moore

…a love that masquerades as pure technique.

Donald Justice

I will abstain from taking that which is not given.

Second Buddhist Precept

The will to the ‘true world’ in the sense of Plato and Christianity … is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

Martin Heidegger (I would immidrash this by suggesting that art must not be true to mere fact (in a very Coomaraswamily sense); that true art is a revolt against randomness and artfice, artifice being identified with the creation of paradigms, theorems and understandings of the world of men which exclude anything else)

This thematically unified collection of short stories analyzes and acclaims the motivating power of romantic love. Osra’s physical beauty is a metaphor for spiritual beauty. Her name, the feminine form of ‘Osric’, is not an invention, but it is sufficiently unusual to suggest that the character is herself extraordinary, separated from life’s routine. Who will best love Osra? He who best knows her, and matches her. In Ruritania, love is the appreciation of the beloved’s uniqueness, accompanied by the commitment to rise to one’s best.

Anon. on Hope’s The Heart of Princess Osra

But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P. And you'll agree. She must be she.

James Joyce

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

Shame is pride’s cloak.

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.

Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!

The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.

Expect poison from standing water.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.

God only Acts and Is, in existing breasts or Men.

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.

Wm. Blake; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another’s.

Jean Paul

I trust I will not be begrudged a position that Stravinsky snd I hold in common.

Kyle Gann

The last, best fruit that comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard; forbearance toward the unforbearing; warmth of heart toward the cold; and philanthropy toward the misanthropic.

Jean Paul

When in your last hour (think of this) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away, and sink into inanity — imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment — then will the flower of belief, which blossoms even in the night, remain to refresh you with its fragrance in the last darkness.

idem

The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.

idem

No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved and sustained by the Spirit of the universe.

idem

The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven.

idem

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

idem

Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Thos. Carlyle

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

idem

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

attr J. Pierpont Morgan

Everyman: Welcome, my Good-Deeds; now I hear thy voice,
I weep for very sweetness of love.

Anon., XV C.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

George Eliot

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

Prof. Geo. E. B. Saintsbury

[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.

idem

The form of the Formless depends on reception.

Sufi aphorism in the Kitab al-Hikam

Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

Peter Ustinov

There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.

Robert Benchley

A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.

The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.

idem

There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Dorothy Parker

An enormously vast field lies between ‘God exists’ and ‘there is no God.’ The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

Anton Chekhoff

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.

idem

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

idem

A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe…. What a terrible future!

idem

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

H. L. Mencken

I never bother about that. Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.

Bernard Baruch on fretting over dinner party seating arrangements

Power is a funny thing. Everyone know they can safely ignore you if every day you rant and rave and go into your dressing room and say, ‘I’m not coming out until they fix that thing’ — but if you exercise it once every four or five years, it kind of scares the hell out of people.

Bob Newhart

Lord Krishna foretold that Kali Yuga will be full of extreme hardships for people with ideals and values.

Anon.

No matter what hyenas sound like, they are not actually laughing.

idem

When I had given much thought and pondered on the matter, I became convinced that these quarrels among the different Christian Churches are not a matter of factual substance, but of words and terminology; for they all confess Christ our Lord to be perfect God and perfect human, without any commingling, mixing, or confusion of the natures… Thus I saw all the Christian communities, with their different christological positions, as possessing a single common ground that is without any difference between them.

Bar Hebræus

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

Adlai Stevenson

The truth is that there is really no ‘profane realm’ that could in any way be opposed to a ‘sacred realm’; there is only a ‘profane point of view’, which is really none other than the point of view of ignorance.

René Guénon

The ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.

idem

…think with the learned and speak with the vulgar.

Bishop Berkeley

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class. This is […] female chauvinism.

Betty Friedan

Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

idem

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

idem

Every truth—if it really is truth—presents itself as universal, even if it is not the whole truth. If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times.

Pope John Paul II

After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that 1 ) all religions are true; 2 ), all religions have some error in them; 3 ), all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible.

Mohandas Kamarchand Gandhi

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

Erwin Rommel

Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.

Luke 17:33

Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.

Winston Churchill

The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.

Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes … they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley…

There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.

Geo. Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

idem

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

idem

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

idem

Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.

idem

California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.

Christopher Isherwood

He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the Zeitgeist and its most interesting expression. He was, in effect, stranded on a beachhead of his own thinking between past and future. That he was not able, by himself, to fashion a bridge between them is neither surprising, nor, in the end, disappointing. We should see this failure, rather, as an aspect of his genius. He both was and was not a man of his time.

Mark Kingwell, on Glenn Gould

Then Manoah inquired of the angel of the LORD, ‘What is your name, so that we may honor you when your word comes true?’ He replied, ‘Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.’

Judges 13:17-18

There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away … There’s nothing to the man … I don’t want to talk about him.

Harold Bloom on a particularly catty critic

Dem höchsten Gott allein zu Ehren,
Dem Nächsten draus sich zu belehren.

To the glory of all-highest God alone
And that my neighbor may be benefitted thereby.

J. S. Bach

Bei einer andächtigen Musik ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnaden Gegenwart. Where there is devotional music, God with his Grace is always present.

idem

If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles.

John Horton Conway, who proved the ‘Free Will Theorem,’ summing it up; and really summing it up, I think

There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight in Los Angeles.

Neil Simon

Los Angeles is really a very intellectual town; we were very lucky to run into him down there.

Dave Guard

Her vices were the wide-open sins of a wide-open country — the sort that never carried a hurt.

Estelline Bennett on Calamity Jane

I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, on the première of his Fourth Symphony

In the next world, I shan’t be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

idem

It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

idem, when asked if his Sixth symphony were programmatic

Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?

idem

There is a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo’s Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City – the intuition that I had been there already.

idem

One of the things I’ve been aware of this time around with Beethoven symphonies is his wonderful rhythmic inventiveness. I believe this aspect of his later work is a cornerstone of his breaking away from a more rigid sense of time of previous generations. It feels sometimes like he is pulling the Earth apart in great chunks to discover what lies beneath. I envision land masses being pried apart to form continents.

Steve Ferguson

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene

Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism.

Charles Seeger

LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.

Emily Dickinson

THE DEVIL , had he fidelity,
Would be the finest friend—
Because he has ability,
But Devils cannot mend.

Perfidy is the virtue
That would he but resign,—
The Devil, so amended,
Were durably divine.

idem

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

Calvin

I think it’s really gross how she drinks Maalox straight from the bottle.

idem

Fictional serial killers are usually more pretentious than frightening, perpetually quoting Milton or arranging their victims in poses designed to evoke the martyrdom of St Sebastian. What are you, a cold-blooded murderer or the controller of Radio 3?

Charlie Brooker

I am myself a Christian, a member of a community that preserves an ancient heritage of great literature and great music, provides help and counsel to young and old when they are in trouble, educates children in moral responsibility, and worships God in its own fashion. But I find Polkinghorne’s theology altogether too narrow for my taste. I have no use for a theology that claims to know the answers to deep questions but bases its arguments on the beliefs of a single tribe. I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.

Freeman Dyson

Disneyworld…is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

Alan Coren

A long, soft sigh, one of those very Italian sighs that express so much, that say ‘Ah, signor, if only this world were an ideal world, what would I not give to be able to do as you ask, we should sit together in the Tuscan sunshine, you and I, just two men together, and we should drink a bottle of the good red wine, and we should sing, ah, how we should sing.'

idem

He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

Alan Bennett

Men take their misfortunes to heart, and keep them there. A gambler does not talk about his losses; the frequenter of brothels, who finds his favorite engaged by another, pretends to be just as well off without her; the professional street-brawler is quiet about the fights he has lost; and a merchant who speculates on goods will conceal the losses he may suffer. All act as one who steps on a crotte in the dark.

Ihara Saikaku

—When did you leave the Catholic Church?
—That’s for the Church to say.

James Joyce to a reporter

Without music there can be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe itself is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.

St Isidore of Seville

The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.

Martin Amis

The strictest justice is sometimes the greatest injustice.

Terence

My children, have no fear, for where Haydn is, no harm can fall.

Franz Joseph Haydn, some of his last words, as Napoleon was preparing to invade Vienna

I have never thought the materialist view possible, and I look to a power beyond what we see, and to a life in which we may at least hope to take part. What is more, I think that Christ and indeed other spiritually gifted men see further and truer than I do, and I wish to follow them as far as I can.

Lord Rayleigh

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Edger Wybe Dijkstra

There are ninety million demigods and seventy million sages, who are all called narayanayana, devotees of Lord Narayana. Among them, only a few are called narayana-parayana/direct devotees are called narayana-parayanas.

anecdote

Mais depuis plus d’une année que, lui révélant à lui-même bien des richesses de son âme, l’amour de la musique était pour quelque temps au moins né en lui, Swann tenait les motifs musicaux pour de véritables idées, d’un autre monde, d’un autre ordre, idées voilées de ténèbres, inconnues, impénétrables à l’intelligence, mais qui n’en sont pas moins parfaitement distinctes les unes des autres, inégales entre elles de valeur et de signification.But ever since, more than a year ago now, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, revealing to him many of the riches of his own soul, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

MAGNANIMITY, n.
L. magnanimitas; magnus, great, and animus, mind.

Greatness of mind; that elevation or dignity of soul, which encounters danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, which raises the possessor above revenge, and makes him delight in acts of benevolence, which makes him disdain injustice and meanness, and prompts him to sacrifice personal ease, interest and safety for the accomplishment of useful and noble objects.

Noah Webster, American Language

Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man — too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.

Frederick Douglass

Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlour—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended… I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, ‘We don’t allow niggers in here!’

idem, My Bondage and My Freedom

I acknowledge no master in human form.

John Brown

The old God of Israel still lives!

Sholom Aleichem

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l’unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l’herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous répondront: ‘Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.’

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: ‘It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!’

Charles Baudelaire, 1864 Paris Spleen, tr. Michael Hamburger

Faint heart never won fair lady.

English proverb

More will mean worse.

Kingsley Amis, referring to the proposed expansion of higher education in 1960

My words are strange, but those who love will understand.

Jan van Ruysbroek

We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.

Meister Eckhart

We need not destroy any little good in ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts another.

idem

Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence.

idem

My man don’t fight until we hears him talk.

regarding the mythopœoic Homo alalus, a boxing manager says to the ref:

Asher’s Seven Sins of Medicine:

Obscurity
Cruelty
Bad manners
Over-specialisation
Love of the rare
Common stupidity
Sloth

Richard Asher

Mitt? What a stupid name. What the hell is it short for? ‘Mitthew'?

Marcus Brigstocke on Mitt Romney

The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother’s Day are the good ones.

Mignon McLaughlin, ditto ‘wives…anniversaries,’ I daresay

Look at the past 25 years — we went downhill, and if people don’t realize it, they don’t have their fucking eyes on. In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there’s available to an average citizen in America right now. I mean, there was nobody going to throw you down on the side of the road spread-eagled, and look up your butt for a fucking marijuana cigarette. God almighty, what have we done to each other?

Merle Haggard

It’s either to the top of the world, or the bottom of a canal.

Carl Barât to Pete Doherty

There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be.

The Bhagavad Gita

Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Wm. Butler Yeats

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

idem

Qiú qiú púsà bǎoyòu wǒ, bùnéng ba.I beg Lord Buddha protect me, I beg not.

Buddhist intercessory prayer

Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, ‘You know, I’ve told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans.’ You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now.

Sir Anthony Eden

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Peter Medawar

The one thing that you simply have to remember all the time that you are there is that Hollywood is an oriental city. As long as you do that, you might survive. If you try to equate it with anything else, you'll perish.

Olivia de Havilland

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Charles Dickens

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Nothing’s as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.

Kin Hubbard

The gap between what ought to be and what ought to be done about it can be very wide.

Bluenote

Cherished as a god, the horse was fed improperly and died.

on Cortés’s steed El Morzillo

Sergei Rachmaninoff, although otherwise a teetotaler, found that a glass of crème de menthe steadied his nerves when playing the technically demanding piano score in the twenty-fourth variation of his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He nicknamed the twenty-fourth the ‘Crème de Menthe Variation.’

anecdote

Your mother may have had fancy tastes, but she had too much class to ever make me or anyone else feel second-rate.

Marty Crane

I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God.

Terry Pratchett

As soon as it touches those next to you the name of suicide is murder.

Victor Hugo

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

I Corinthians 15:22

Deviant logic: a non-excluded middle that makes you feel like Haacking.

Bluenote

I’m going to stop you there. You have an incredibly important job. You offer people an escape, you offer people a way out and some relief from anything they might be going through and it’s a very important job.

Billy Connolly to Emily Blunt

That is an honorable occupation.

a Korean dry cleaner to Cody, on working as a musician

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

Herbert Hoover

This is a Government of the people by the people and for the people no longer. It is a Government of Corporation by Corporation and for Corporation.

Rutherford B. Hayes, mothafucka!

Though thou hast ever so many counsellors, yet do not forsake the counsel of thy own soul.

English proverb

Today me, tomorrow thee.

idem

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.

Thos. Jefferson

You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.

John Adams, to Jefferson

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

‘THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC’

Kurt Vonnegut

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G.K. Chesterton

Arlo, you know if you can’t be great, it’s better to belong.

Woody Guthrie

When after a recital of Rubinstein’s a lady auditor began to praise him in gushing fashion, he replied, ‘Madam, I could give another concert with the notes I left out’

anecdote

…the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion —something which the blindest half see— but leave unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning and their true function.

George Santayana

I am Raftery the poet
Full of hope and love
With no light in my eyes
With gentleness that has no misery
Going west upon my pilgrimage
By the light of my heart
Though feeble and tired
To the end of my rove.
Behold me now
With my back to the wall
Playing music
Unto empty pockets.

Anthony Raftery

I’m not a politician, I’m a musician. I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.

Luciano Pavarotti

Its literary merits must be left to the judgment of its readers; as to its truth, I should not hesitate to make the confident assertion that from the first word to the last I have aimed at nothing else.

Flavius Josephus, The Jewish Wars

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Noli timere.

Seamus Heaney, last words, to his beloved

In order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them.

idem, from ‘Joy or Night'

E non bisogna andare ma correre, volare alla perfezione.

Maddalena de’ Pazzi

A pregnancy without joy, he said, a birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness. Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we withstand, withsay.

James Joyce, Ulysses

We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.

John Scotus Eriugena

Sine experientia nihil sufficienter sciri potest.

Roger Bacon

I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A notable difference between the Jews and the Philistines: David slew Goliath and became King of the Jews. But Goliath would have remained only a warrior among warriors.

‘recollected’ by J. Cosgrove Butchie

When you don’t know the whole truth, the worst you can imagine is bound to be close.

idem

Titles Wallace Stevens missed in coming up with Le Monocle de Mon Oncle:

La Macaque de Ma Caque
Le Machine de Ma Chine
Le Macon de Ma Con
Le Mahometan de Ma Homme et Ane
La Mammaire de Ma Mere
La Mademoiselle de Ma Demoiselle
La Madeleine de Mad Helen
La Macule de Ma Cul
Le Majesté de Mot Juste, hein!
La Mammelle de Ma Miel
La Maîtresse de Mes Tresses
La Manquée de Mon Quai
La Matière de Ma Terre
Le Mal de Ma Halle
La Maçon de Ma Son
Le Matin de Ma Tain
Le Manoir de Ma Noire
Le Maquis de Ma Qui
La Mairie de Mes Ris
Le Marqueur de Ma Cœur
Le Monôme de Mon Nom
La Mamie de Ma Mie
Le Monde de M’Ondes

anecdote

People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other.

Anthony Powell

Chettam: He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense.
Mrs. Cadwallader:…he is vulnerable there – always a few grains of common sense in an ounce of miserliness.

George Eliot

…a more inclusive formulation would posit an essential and continuing tension in higher organisms between, on the one hand, the establishment and maintenance of environmental constancies, inner and outer; and, on the other, the interruption of achieved equilibria in the interest of new possibilities of experience.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Entry on Creativity

La photographie acquiert un peu de la dignite qui lui manque quand elle cesse d'etre une reproduction du reel et nous montre des choses qui n'existent plus.Photography acquires a bit of the dignity it lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of the real and shows us something which no longer exists.

Marcel Proust

…if the dispute were to continue long enough, it would divide those who love the Torah more than God from those who love God more than any of His revelations…

Denis Donoghue

One should be ever booted, spurred and ready to depart.

Montaigne

Every man loves what he is good at.

Thos. Shadwell

Something will come of this; I hope it mayn’t be human gore.

Charles Dickens

…after the player has tried to comprehend both physically and intellectually the musical organism confronting him, his final task —beyond any verbal or musical analysis— is to embody this understanding in a performance where, if he is fortunate, the heavenly lightning will kindle the tinder he has patiently assembled.

Frederick Hammond

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

Saml. Butler

Ed Wall, Jerry Cupit and I have been quail hunting. Some of those quail was too dumb to know they were dead, and kept on flying.

Justin Wilson

Ale kam ted?
A kam odtamtud?

(But whereto now?
And whereto from there?)

Jaroslav Seifert

What you have inherited from your fathers,
Strive to make it your own.

Goethe

Why buy a book of poems since so few poets successfully create entire works of quality? The coincidence of choice in most anthologies testifies to this sad truth. Or does it suggests some herd-instinct among anthologists? The only solution is to buy all the books of all the poets. You are the only trustworthy anthologist.

Anon.

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.

‘Give me your left eye,’ said the king of the trolls, ‘and I will tell you.’

Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. ‘Now tell me.’

The troll said, ‘The secret is, Watch with both eyes!’

John Gardner

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archaeologists. The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect…I would murder my past if I tried to evoke it on camera; and it is precisely because I can’t evoke it in words, can only hope to awaken some analogous experience in other memories and sensitivities, that it must be written.

John Fowles

An answer is always a form of death.

idem

Life itself is an unfavorable condition.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Historically, religious adepts, Western and Eastern, have eschewed bodily pleasures, we must presume, on account of their own feeble spirituality. The falsity of corporeal perceptions is no greater than that of the spirit, but the persuasiveness of such evidence compared to the ‘mental’ presents an insurmountable difficulty for the fainthearted. The rare exceptions prove the rule. Blake could reconcile the treacherous dichotomy as St. Paul could not. This suggests that Pauline spirituality was not so palpable to St. Paul as the Blakean vision was to Blake.

J. Cosgrove Butchie, cf. the meal and its compl(e/i)mentary pleasures afterward

That put the hay down where the mules can get at it.

Seth Lipsky

Every man everywhere is more of his time than of his nation.

W. B. Yeats

Swift’s discovery, fundamental for art, is that there are no uninteresting objects in the world so long as there exists an artist to stare at everything with the incomprehension of a nincompoop.

Andrei Sinyavsky

…when Geoffrey Hill writes ‘The dead are my obsession this week’ he underestimates his attention span.

Alastair Fowler

Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row.

Patrick Kavanagh

—Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?
—Au contraire.

Guess qui!

Rood-screen — Rune screed.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

The trouble with life is that it doesn’t lay good.

Jack Marshall, with allusion to certain musical passages not suitable to the guitar fretboard

If I don’t love you
Grits ain’t groceries
Eggs ain’t poultry
and the Mona Lisa was a man.

Little Milton

Just consider that…Voltaire accepted without question the fact that in their time men were still broken on the wheel — a thing that to us with our feelings is unimaginable. And do you imagine that we are a different case? …We take it as a matter of course that two men, both of them honourable…should of a morning stand and shoot at each other. And the fact that we put up with such a thing, and that they do it shows how completely imprisoned we all are in conventional feeling. But feelings are inert, and that’s why they’re so cruel. The world is ruled by the inertia of feeling.

Hermann Broch, Sleepwalkers

We must constantly choose between health and sanity on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been cowardly enough to choose the former.

Marcel Proust, The Captive

In a world of cause and effect, all coincidences are suspect.

Rex Stout

Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

G. K. Chesterton

I live in a gayer town than either, but in a much gloomier universe.

Bluenote

Nobody expects graffiti to survive for centuries or Plotkin to get to the point, just as nobody expects Kierkegaard to be funny.

Terry Eagleton sic actually J. Cosgrove Butchie

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.'

C. S. Lewis: The Last Battle

Work is okay for killing time, but it’s a shaky way to make a living.

Brett Maverick

Do not kill time, for it will surely kill thee.

Sundial motto

I think we ought to buy a tortoise so that something in this damn house will outlive us.

Wendy Brandchaft

The best automobile safety device is a rearview mirror…with a cop in it.

Dudley Moore

Health is just the slowest way you can die.

Anon.

Don’t think of it as being outnumbered, think of it as a wider target selection.

Military proverb

I think it would be a very good idea.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilization

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Charles De Gaulle

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

Edmund Burke

If One Is Truly to Succeed in Leading a Person to a Specific Place, One must First and Foremost Take Care to Find Him Where He Is and Begin There.

This is the secret in the entire art of helping. Anyone who cannot do this is himself under a delusion if he thinks he is able to help someone else. In order truly to help someone else, I must understand more than he — but certainly first and foremost understand what he understands. If I do not do that, then my greater understanding does not help him at all. If I nevertheless want to assert my greater understanding, then it is because I am vain or proud, then basically instead of benefiting him I really want to be admired by him. But all true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate but to serve, that to help is not to be the most dominating but the most patient, that to help is a willingness for the time being to put up with being in the wrong and not understanding what the other understands.

Søren Kierkegaard, 1853 essay

To none will we sell, to none deny or delay, right or justice.

Magna Carta

Always predict the worst and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.

Tom Lehrer

When Sir Winton Turnbull, who represented a large rural seat was raving and ranting on the adjournment and shouted: ‘I am a Country member'. I interjected ‘I remember'. He could not understand why, for the first time in all the years he had been speaking in the House, there was instant and loud applause from both sides.

Gough Whitlam

Well may we say ‘God save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General’s Official Secretary was countersigned Malcolm Fraser, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur. They won’t silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for the next few weeks … Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.

idem

During the 1975 Australian election campaign in the wake of the double dissolution and ensuing constitutional crisis it becomes clear that Labor was flagging. The party organizers decided that something spectacular had to be done, so the Party Chairman approached Gough Whitlam.

‘Listen, Gough,’ he says, ‘you must do something. If you’d only walk across Lake Burley Griffin tomorrow, it’ll prove what we all suspect — that you’re divine — and it might just give us a boost in the election.’

Gough sighs, but assents, saying, ‘All right. Get the press and the ABC and we’ll go down tomorrow and I’ll try.’

So next morning, the lakeside is mobbed by reporters and cameramen and union organizers and everyone else, basically the entire population, all congregating to see this bold claim come off. He stands there a while, Lingiari tarrying with him while his soul was sorrowful unto death. He tentatively steps out onto the surface of the water, and, Deo gratia, his foot holds. He slowly puts his other foot across the rippling waves and brings it down — it, too, holds! He takes another step, and another, and another, and another — and he walks across the surface of Lake Burley Griffin!

The Press were ecstatic. He made every front page in the nation and softened the heart of the most cynical newspaperman there, moving every man, woman and child to tears.

All, that is, except Rupert Murdoch, whose paper The Australian carried the following headline:

WHITLAM FAILS TO SWIM LAKE BURLEY GRIFFIN

anecdote

Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда.We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

Viktor Chernomyrdin

England was merry England, when
Old Christmas brought his sports again.
’Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;
’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man’s heart through half the year.

Sir Walter Scott

But woe awaits a country when
She sees the tears of bearded men.

idem

Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.

Harold Bloom, cf. Dr King on love and power

There is a certain irony in this, i.e., politicized objections to the canon, in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

John Searle

One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.

Madame de Pompadour

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the opening of the Parlement of Foules

The day is short, the labor vast, the workers lazy, the reward great, the Master urgent.

Rebbe Tarfon, Avot 2:20

I am about courting a girl I have had but little acquaintance with. How shall I come to a knowledge of her faults, and whether she has the virtues I imagine she has? Answer. Commend her among her female acquaintance.

Benjamin Franklin

Everything you do in the presence of your child has the effect of teaching.

Evergreen Preschool unofficial motto

De moribus non est disputandum.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.

Tom Stoppard; Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

idem; Jumpers

Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, ‘This is a good bacon sandwich,’ or, ‘Bedser had a good wicket.'

ibid.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.

idem; Travesties

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

idem; The Real Thing

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

idem, Arcadia

Oh, you’re going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the Bomb and aerosols. But don’t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars – big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?

ibid.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

Freeman Dyson

So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

George Meredith; The Lark Ascending

…on lips red as the kovvai fruit
cool matted hair,
the milk-white ash on coral skin,
and the sweet golden foot raised up in dance,
then even human birth on this wide earth would be a thing worth having.

sic. appar. on the Dance of Shiva

Something funny is ganging up in the middle on us.

Chuck Plotkin

Without arts programmes there’s only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.

Billy Connolly

These men — Yeats, James Stephens, and the rest — had aristocratic minds. For them, the world was not fragmented. An idea did not suddenly grow … all alone and separate. For them, all things had long family trees. They saw nothing shameful or silly in myths and fairy stories, nor did they shovel them out of sight and some cupboard marked ‘Only For Children.’ They were always willing to concede that there was more things in heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed of. They allowed for the unknown. And, as you can imagine, I took great heart from this. It was Æ who showed me how to look and learn from one’s own writing. ‘Popkins’ he said once — he always called her just plain Popkins, whether deliberately mistaking the name or not I never knew. His humor was always subtle — Popkins had she lived in another age, in the old times to which she certainly belongs, she would undoubtedly have had long golden tresses, a wreath of flowers in one hand, and perhaps a spear in the other. Her eyes would have been like the sea, her nose comely, and on her feet winged sandals. But, this age being the Kali Yuga, as the Indus call it — in our terms, the Iron Age — she comes in habiliments suited to it.’

P. L. Travers

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.

Psalms 42:7

You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can’t turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald’s in them, and it’s all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what’s happening to them in this culture, and it’s too bad that that’s happening because that’s what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America.

This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don’t know what they’re doing, or why they’re here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what’s expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.'

Woody Allen, 1979

If you suppose that there is a real external world which is the active cause of sensation and which can consequently be influenced by our voluntary actions (an idea which I recommend you to avoid), then the danger arises of going on from this plausible explanation of our common experience to regarding our knowledge of it as obvious, inevitable and complete, and to stop being concerned about its origin or the degree of completeness to which it can attain. To do so is simply wrong; this is no mere dispute over words.

Erwin Schrödinger

For you are driving your horses through
The mist where Genesis begins.

Patrick Kavanagh

His diction is an unclassifiable mélange of the regional, the archaic and the nonce. ‘Their horses were foul spine-sprung things, malandered about the necks, beshat greenly across the hindquarters, and trailing ropey harls of yellow snot blown from all the orifices of their heads.’ I have no precise idea what ‘spine-sprung’ means, or whether ‘malandered’ and harls’ are actual words. But I see the horses.

Louis Menand on Charles Frazier

In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1992…Pope John Paul II quoted St. Augustine to the effect that if it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly.

Quoted by Claudio Vita-Finzi

The fear of dualism…in its most bizarre manifestation…leads to…another theory, called ‘eliminative’ materialism. This is the view that, because mental states can’t be accomodated within the world described by physics, they don’t exist — just as witches and ghosts don’t exist. They can be dismissed as postulates of a primitive theory customarily referred to as ‘fool psychology’ — about which Sir Peter Strawson…has remarked, ‘Ah yes, the province of such simple folk as Flaubert, Proust and Henry James.’

quoted by Thos. Nagel

There is always something. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Similarly black melody and white harmony interacted in a pain that at once disturbed and healed. The phenomenon of ‘blue’ notes epitomizes this: for the ‘natural’ flat sevenths of modal melodies clash with sharpened leading notes demanded by Western dominant-tonic harmony. This repeats a process that had happened in European history, when ‘false relations’ occurred between the vocal flat sevenths of medieval modality and the sharpened intervals called for by post-Renaissance harmony. Blue notes in Afro-American jazz are exactly comparable, likewise springing from a clash between worlds.

Wilfrid Mellers reviewing Origins of the Popular Style of Peter Van der Merwef

I am not indifferent to Ricoeur’s warning: ‘We never have the right to speculate on either the evil that we inaugurate, or on the evil that we find, without reference to the history of salvation;'…nor am I oblivious to the danger and responsibility which may be incurred when, for whatever reason, one is unable to give real assent to Ricoeur’s caveat. In such a circumstance it is possible, or even probable, that criticism, committed to examine ‘the involuntariness at the very heart of the voluntary’, is revealed as a symptom of that which it claims to diagnose.

Geoffrey Hill

…they were meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union.

George Eliot

It remains to be seen whether man’s victory over his powerlessness when carried to a state out of all proportion to the objectives with which he was satisfied during the previous millennia of his history, will not lead back to unreason. The first two volumes of this series were concerned with bringing to light the hidden logic behind mythic thought, in its dual aspect as a logic of qualities and a logic of forms. We now find that mythology also conceals an ethical system, but one which, unfortunately, is far more remote from our ethic than its logic is from our logic. If the origin of table manners, and more generally that of correct behavior, is to be found…in deference towards the world --good manners consisting precisely in respecting its obligations-- it follows that the inherent ethic of the myths runs counter to the ethic we profess today. It teaches us, at any rate, that the formula ‘hell is other people’, which has achieved such widespread fame, is not so much a philosophical proposition as an ethnographical statement about our civilization. For, since childhood, we have been accustomed to fear impurity as coming from without.

When they assert, on the contrary that ‘hell is ourselves’, savage peoples give a lesson in humility which, it is to be hoped, we may still be capable of understanding. In the present century, when man is actively destroying countless living forms, after wi ping out so many societies who wealth and diversity had, from time immemorial, constituted the better part of his inheritance, it has probably never been more necessary to proclaim, as do the myths, that sound humanism does not begin with oneself, but puts the world before life, life before man, and respect for others before self-interest: and that no species, not even our own, can take the fact of having been on this earth for one or two million years --since, in any case, man’s stay here will one day come to an end-- as an excuse for appropriating the world as if it were a thing and behaving on it with neither decency nor discretion.

Claude Levi-Strauss

…those terrible troughs –which in retrospect are called ‘lying fallow,’ but while they occur one must call sterility–…

Geoffrey Hill

I’m with the artists. I didn’t ask the permission of the ANC. I didn’t ask permission of Buthelezi, or Desmond Tutu, or the Pretoria government. And to tell you the truth, I have a feeling that when there are radical transfers of power on either the left or the right, the artists always get screwed.

Paul Simon

There is no such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia,’ but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

R D. Laing; cf. Benchley on Bucharest

Joy beyond the walls of the world, as poignant as grief.

J. R. R. Tolkien on C. S. Lewis’s belief

I used to be a pretty good singer until tunes come into fashion.

Anon., quoted in How to Play the 5-String Banjo

I feel it’s so easy to condemn this country, the United States, but they don’t understand that this is where the mistakes are being made — and made first, so that we’re going to get the answers first.

Christopher Isherwood

If you take a ’37 Packard grill and split it down
the center and reduce the angle by 18° and reweld it,
you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce
just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.

Philip Levine

There are still taboos, of course, but their nature has changed. For example, when I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.’

Tom Lehrer

At fifteen one is first beginning to realize that everything isn’t money and power in this world, and is casting about for joys that do not turn to dross in one’s hands.

Robert Benchley

The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall. … The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.

idem

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

idem

The only cure for a real hangover is death.

idem

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

idem

There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.

Novalis

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

idem

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

idem

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

idem

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

idem

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. … The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with ‘I am.’ The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

idem

Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.

idem

Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.

idem

We dream of a journey through the universe. But is the universe then not in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. Inward goes the secret path. Eternity with its worlds, the past and the future, is in us or nowhere.

idem

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

idem

Every beloving subject is the center point of a paradise.

Bluenote

Where children are, there is a golden age.

Novalis

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

idem

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

idem

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

idem

Die Liebe wirkt magisch.
Sie ist der Endzweck
der Weltgeschichte, das Amen des Universums.

Love wreaks magic.
It is the endpoint
The great line of the world
The breath of the Universe.

idem

Whoso speaks truly is full of eternallife, and wonderfully related to genuinemysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.

idem

Plutarch’s account of the shrine of the goddess Minerva, identified with Isis, at Sais, which he reports had the inscription ‘I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.'

idem

If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

idem

Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature.

idem

The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttodtung); this is the real beginning of all Philosophy; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct.

idem

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

idem

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

idem

A character is a completely fashioned will (vollkommen gebildeter Wille).

idem

It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

idem

When we speak of the aim and Art observable in Shakespeare’s works, we must not forget that Art belongs to Nature; that it is, so to speak, self-viewing, self-imitating, self-fashioning Nature. The Art of a well-developed genius is far different from the Artfulness of the Understanding, of the merely reasoning mind. Shakspeare was no calculator, no learned thinker; he was a mighty, many-gifted soul, whose feelings and works, like products of Nature, bear the stamp of the same spirit; and in which the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man. They are emblematic, have many meanings, are simple and inexhaustible, like products of Nature; and nothing more unsuitable could be said of them than that they are works of Art, in that narrow mechanical acceptation of the word.

idem

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

idem

The ardent and holy Novalis…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never was he seen languid or exhausted, never out of spirits or out of humor.

Ludwig Tieck

Novalis’s ideas, on what has been called the ‘perfectibility of man,’ ground themselves on his peculiar views of the constitution of material and spiritual Nature, and are of the most original and extraordinary character. With our utmost effort, we should despair of communicating other than a quite false notion of them. He asks, for instance, with scientific gravity: Whether any one, that recollects the first kind glance of her he loved, can doubt the possibility of Magic?

Thos. Carlyle

Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew is a Jew.

Amos Oz

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.

Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

[T]he conjugal love of Leonore appears, to the modern individual armed with realism and psychology, irremediably abstract and theoretical…. Now that political events in Germany have restored to the concepts of human dignity and liberty their original significance, this is the opera which, thanks to the music of Beethoven, gives us comfort and courage…. Certainly, Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. That which disturbs us is not a material effect, nor the fact of the ‘imprisonment'; any film could create the same effect. No, it is the music, it is Beethoven himself. It is this ‘nostalgia of liberty’ he feels, or better, makes us feel; this is what moves us to tears. His Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a ‘religion of humanity’ which we never found so beautiful or necessary as we do today, after all we have lived through. Herein lies the singular power of this unique opera…. Independent of any historical consideration … the flaming message of Fidelio touches deeply. We realize that for we Europeans, as for all men, this music will always represent an appeal to our conscience.

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

Peter Ustinov

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.

idem

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.

idem

When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form … The electronics we used were ‘feed forward’, which means that the input from the player projects forward – the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing – so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive – it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.

Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples – it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, we'd put the headphones down and say, ‘Got it. That’s the one.'

Roger Mayer

When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, ‘Southern California’s special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.’

I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don’t think I'd take those words back.

Thos. Pynchon

The 1862 Blaydon Races Song is the National Anthem of Tyneside.

Blaydon Borough Council

There’s only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme.

Keith Richards

Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.

Adlai Stevenson

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.

idem

It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.

idem

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.

John Stuart Mill

He had that quality for which the Africans, who know how to appreciate it, have found a special term. ‘Nommo’ is the Bantu word for the gift of making life rather larger and more vivid for everyone else.

Barbara Ward on Adlai Stevenson

When all of your peers are listening to electronically generated music, listening to something with loud electric guitars front and center is a more rebellious act than it’s been in decades.

Miles Raymer

[S]ocratic irony is the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it.

Søren Kierkegaard

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

Bernard Malamud

Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.

Benny Hill

K. K. Darrow in a colloquium that recounted some of his remembrances told this story about a European physicist. About 75 years ago the physicist was visiting the Harvard Library and couldn’t find the Natural Philosophy section. He asked the librarian for help. She showed him to the proper section and said ‘We call it Physics.’

anecdote

This is an attempt to explain the value of the absolute zero temperature. To reach it, all degrees of freedom must be frozen. Now, due to Eddington, proton and electron have both 1/alpha degrees of freedom. But even at absolute zero, their circulating around each other can’t stop. Summing up, this means absolute zero is at minus (2/alpha-1) degrees. With a value of 1/alpha=137.08, this makes -273.16 degrees, which is surprisingly close to the known value.

Joke, recalled from the journal Die Naturwissenschaften in the ’30s heyday of Eddington numerology

A university faculty is five hundred egotists with a common parking problem.

Keith Sullivan

A soft impulse of love is the sole life of a melting heart. A tiny hope of love brings the light of dawn through the darkness of a lengthy night, and love, small, even as the twinkling of the faintest star, keeps the light at the altar shining. And in that faintest light of love, some day, the beloved finds his way and creeps on in silence, in quietness, drawn by that tiny, tiny love, which kept the door open in the hope of fulfillment; in the hope of fulfillment, that some day and some time the darkness of the night would give way to the brightness of the midday sun in a clear sky.

Maharishi

When we were growing up, the 45 single was the heart of rock-and-roll and in many regards still is. It’s the hardest thing to pull off. The surest sign that a band is growing stale and running out of creative ideas is when it turns to prog. And I well remember the 1970s when prog almost destroyed rock music. It’s the mold growing on a congealed band on its last legs. Indeed, it still lurks among us in new, insidious forms like indie. The few times U2 has attempted prog, we’ve tempered it with good songwriting.

Bono

He does not hesitate at our boldest Measures but rather seems to think us too irresolute.

John Adams, on Ben Franklin<

If you want to serve the age, betray it.

Brendan Kennelly; The Book of Judas

La grande ligne is the sense of forward motion…the feeling for inevitability, for the creating of an entire piece that could be thought of as a functioning entity.

Nadia Boulanger

The supermarket test. It’s absolutely brutal. If you can find yourself attracted to someone in frozen foods, just get married right there. That’s the one for you.

Jerry Seinfeld

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

Wm. Blake

Not all men are worthy of love.

Sigmund Freud

Make me immortal with a kiss.

Kit Marlowe

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

Perhaps it may be expected that I should say something concerning rules of composition; to those I answer that Nature is the best dictator, for not all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any person to form an air.. It must be Nature, Nature who must lay the foundation. Nature must inspire the thought. For my own part, as I don’t think myself confined to any rules of composition, laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think (were I to pretend to lay down rules) that any one who came after me were in any ways obligated to adhere to them, any further than they should think proper; so in fact I think it best for every composer to be his own carver.

Perhaps some may think that I mean and intend to throw Art entirely out of the question. I answer, by no means, for the more art is displayed, the more Nature is decorated. And in some sorts of composition there is dry study required, and art very requisite. For instance, in a fugue, where the parts come in after each other with the same notes, but even here, art is subservient to genius, for fancy goes first and strikes out the work roughly, and art comes after and polishes it over.

Wm. Billings

The biggest human temptation is … to settle for too little.

Thos. Merton

Rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and sincere.

Simon Frith

Editor Ian Hamilton reacts incredulously to a potential contributor to the New Review who has just declined a large Scotch on the grounds he doesn’t like drinking in the morning: ‘Well, none of us likes it!'

anecdote

…in general they are best sung together, viz. if a man sings it as a Medius, and a woman as a Treble, it is in effect as two parts; so likewise, if a man sing a Tenor with a masculine and woman with a feminine voice, the Tenor is as full as two parts, and a tune so sung (although it has but four parts) is in effect the same as six. Such a conjunction of masculine and feminine voices is beyond expression, sweet and ravishing, and is esteemed by all good judges to be vastly preferable to any instrument whatever, framed by human invention.

Wm. Billings

[A]ll the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me…is that gold does exist (and for ‘gold’ say ‘truth’, say ‘the answer’, say ‘love’, say ‘justice’, say anything): it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.

Stephen Fry

Sublime Art - In so many grey hours in which I have been trapped by life’s wild circle, you have inspired my heart to warm love. You have brought me into a better world.

inscription in German on an 1860s banjo

Nationalism is idolatry.

Josh Fruhlinger

All mushrooms are edible; but some only once.

Croatian proverb

Not only does it get harder, it gets easier.

Rick Danko

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

St. Francis of Assisi

You wake up every day and fight mental health.

J. Cosgrove Butchie

In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

Ravi Shankar

In the 19th century, around Vidin, it was not unusual for a woman in her thirties to have a man of fifteen years.

Književnik; Franjo Rački, Josip Torbar, 1866

A traveler came upon two Shopi sitting in the village square. Since he was traveling to Istanbul he asked one of them for directions in English. The Shopi made a clicking sound with his mouth and shook head, I don’t understand. The traveler attempted the same question in French, German, Russian, Spanish and other languages, but had the same result. Aggravated, the traveler started going in one direction that happened to be wrong. The second Shopi, observing this scene, lamented to his buddy ‘Ah, this guy knows so many languages and you knew none of them.’ The first Shopi said ‘And what good did it do him?’

anecdote

I apologise for the length of this letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.

from a letter written in French —which is not to say a French letter— during the 19th century

On the window of a dry cleaner’s in Luxembourg:

Morgens gebracht, abends gemacht.

Below this is another sign, this time in French:

Fermé le matin.

anecdote

Music dispels the fear of mortality and the need for rigid and permanent identities. Music rejects the nine-to-five schedule, the hunger for cash, the encroachments and limits of crass appetite.

Russell Sherman, Pomona College Music Director

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Jonathan Franzen

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Norman Mailer

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today…. We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

idem

I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

idem

I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

idem

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

idem

Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one’s private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

idem

Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

idem

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

idem

He understands not only with his brain but with his heart. And that might be called love. Not quite sure, but maybe that’s the key.

Anne Bancroft on Mel Brooks

Mel is sensual with me. He treats me like an uncle — a dirty uncle. He’s an earthy man and very moral underneath. He has traditional values.

Madeline Kahn

When you feel your own equal in the body of a beautiful woman, just as ready to forget the world for you as you for her – oh my good Lord – who can describe what happiness then. You can live it, now and again – you cannot speak of it.

Erwin Schrödinger

If it was happening, I'd call it Heavenly Beast. If it wasn’t happening, I usually call it Arsehole.

Angus Young, on his guitar’s name

Bart Plantenga: We met in 1993 at a spoken word event at the pseudo-hip Fez in NYC. I remember you describing yourself as an anarcho-royalist, something like the spirit of anarchy with the amenities of royalty. You disparaged the entire suffering artist affliction: Van Gogh, Billy Holiday, Cobain, ad nauseam . You still stand by this assessment?

Judy Nylon: I absolutely stand by it! Poverty and sanctity are separate issues. I hate suffering for or by anyone or anything ever… There seems to be no rule here. Sometimes inherited wealth or physical beauty even drops on the right people. It gets creepy though when someone misuses what they’re given; like when some clown with a 19th-century robber baron trust fund looks at a restaurant bill and informs you that you owe seventy-five cents for the coffee.

anecdote

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

Margaret Mead

Where there is muck, there is brass.

Yorkshire proverb

Short answer: yes with an ‘if'
Long answer: no with a ‘but'

anecdote

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

V. S. Naipaul

I know! They’re aesthetically beautiful and fully functional as comfy pillows too - what’s not to like?!!

John Stringer

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

Tom Stoppard

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…

Tolkien on Bombadil (‘There’s a little place in my heart where everything is still groovy')

The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is: the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great deal. The Good one Really Does Copy a Great deal.

Wm. Blake

To call for an ‘erotics of art’ did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to, then, as ‘popular’ culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its burden of seriousness, of depth. I thought I’d seen through certain kinds of facile moralism [...] and was denouncing them in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic,’ to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision of temperament, probably unhealthy, too.

Susan Sontag

Tradition is not worshipping ashes, it’s preserving fire.

Gustav Mahler

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

Naomi Wolf

Every cat is black at night.

Czech proverb

Someone who wants to help comes without asking.

Finnish proverb

…many professing agnostics are nearer belief in the true God than are many conventional church-goers who believe in a body that does not exist whom they miscall God.

Leslie Weatherhead

Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmiths.

Elizabeth I

Damn it all, you can’t have a crown of thorn and thirty pieces of silver!

Aneurin Bevan

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing.

Robert Benchley

Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.

Clifford Odets

The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment.

Jean Paul

Has it never occurred to us, when surrounded by sorrows, that they may be sent to us only for our instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we wish to teach them to sing?

idem

The wish falls often warm upon my heart that I may learn nothing here that I cannot continue in the other world; that I may do nothing here but deeds that will bear fruit in heaven.

idem

It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions…that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an élite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vapourous.

T. S. Eliot

[F]airy stories make rivers run with wine, only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

G. K. Chesterton

It’s like I say. We used to all sit around … me and Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins and we’d talk about things. If one of us had a hit, we’d say: ‘That’s fabulous. It’s a damn good song.’ But now, the people that I meet are so damn big headed … it’s not music any more, it’s business. But now … I’ve met Jim Morrison of the Doors … a fantastic person. Really a nice guy, and he takes me back to the people I knew in the old days. Listen, a star is not a star. We never considered ourselves that. I’m always pushing, man, to get something better. And that’s the same with Jim and fellas like John Sebastian.

Gene Vincent

What makes the hero a hero is the romantic notion that he stands above the tawdry give and take of everyday politics, occupying an ethereal realm where partisanship gives way to patriotism, and division to unity, and where the nation regains its lost innocence, and the people their shared sense of purpose.

on Roosevelt

We are responsible for each other in some slim, uncategorizable way.

Kaitlyn Tiffany

[C]ritics who were most appreciative of Ulysses are complaining about my new work. They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these 20 pages now before us (i.e. chapter I.8) cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit.

James Joyce; and thanks to you for that, lad

Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody.

Saml. Beckett

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

G.K. Chesterton

The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.

Earle Hitchner

Loved you then,
Love you still
Always have,
Always will.

Nicole Stringer <3

This is not the whole truth yet.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Great artists formerly were more eclectic than ourselves, and less fettered by their nationalities…. We must do as they did. We must try to recreate an art in which the arts of all countries and all times are blended.

Lorenzo Perosi

In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, Sodomy & smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and pathic.

Lord Byron, presumably with irony

It’s the hardest thing, living with a saint, isn’t it?

Johnny Vegas

A man once asked me … how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.’ I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Dorothy L. Sayers

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

G. K. Chesterton

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

Thos. Pynchon

There are no two things as important to us in life and art as being threatened and being saved … All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.

Robert Frost

The news is about what people want to keep hidden. Everything else is publicity.

Bill Moyers

The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democratsinto the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations. The Republicans, by contrast, are behaving like the radical party — the party of the reckless and the embittered, bent on dismantling institutions which have been built solidly into our social fabric. . . . Our social-security system and our Democratic Party’s sponsorship of the social reforms and advances of the past two decades — conservatism at its best. Certainly there could be nothing more conservative than to change when change is due, to reduce tensions and wants by wise changes, rather than to stand pat stubbornly, until, like King Canute, we are engulfed by relentless forces that will always go too far.

Adlai Stevenson

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws — all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages — are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.

What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions — a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love — the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see.

idem

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

idem

You can count on him. He'll always let you down.

John Cooper Clarke

Having translated a good deal of the Apocrypha, I’m now onto the second Gospel which I am translating from the Syriac… In starting to translate the New Testament, I was suddenly struck by a singular idea – that you have to be Jewish to be able to do it.

Alkan

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else.

Guy de Maupassant, Isaac Babel?

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth.

Isaac Babel

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

Saul Bellow

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde — dyed by her own hand.

idem

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

idem

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

idem

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

idem

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

idem

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

idem

A celebration of women’s bodies is all right with me so long as there is no denial of the personhood of women. I suppose sometimes women are sex objects — and men are too, by the way. It’s the definition of women just as sex objects that bothers me. Women can celebrate themselves as sex objects, they can celebrate their own sexuality and can enjoy the sexuality of men as far as I’m concerted. Let’s have men centerfolds. […] Playboy’s centerfold is fine. It’s holding onto your own anachronism and it is not pornographic, though many of my sisters would disagree. It’s harmless.[…] Playboy strikes me as an odd mixture of sex — sometimes juvenile — and forward intellectual thoughts.

Betty Friedan

Will you accept three hundred per week to work for paramount pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

Herman Mankiewicz to Ben Hecht (who accepted)

Everything’s going to be all right. Amen.

sgj

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Benedict Spinoza: The Ethics V

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy: Speech at White House, March 1962

Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.

Anon.

'What is too silly to be said may be sung’ — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.

Sir Kenneth Clark

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

idem

Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.

idem

For a Prussian the situation may be serious, but never hopeless; for the Austrian hopeless, but never serious.

Anon.

Lisp doesn’t look any deader than usual to me.

David Thornley, reply to a question older than most languages

The most dirty and filthy way to love is higher and better than the cleanest way to hurt.

Anon.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Theodore Roosevelt

You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

Chinese proverb

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Norman Mailer

The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow’s veil; the future, the virgin’s.

Jean Paul

Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Martin Amis

Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot’s ‘Jew’, words edge closer to deeds. In Céline’s anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed. In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, ‘gouts of bile,’ as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, ‘Gloomy old sod, aren’t I?’ Or more simply, ‘Grrr.’

idem

The four most overrated things in the world are lobster, Champagne, anal sex, and picnics.

Christopher Hitchens

Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor Adorno

There is no mystery as great as suffering.

Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince

Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.

W. H. Auden

Nature is not like wood being made into a ship, but like wood that makes itself into a ship.

Thos. Aquinas

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Matthew 6:34

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

the last verse of the Inferno

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

Horace

Every lie haunts our future.

Sam Harris

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman.

John Ball

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

Alan Bennett

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.

Alison Bechdel

Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other.

Friedrich Hölderlin

It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven.

idem

In Cornwall is two speches, the one is naughty Englysshe, and the other is Cornysshe speche. And there be many men and women the which cannot speake one worde of Englysshe, but all Cornyshe.

Andrew Borde

I experience ‘hunger’ and ‘appetite’ as two totally distinct feelings.

Claire Saffitz

The amount of money one needs is terrifying.

Ludwig van Beethoven

You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.

Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.

Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

Theirs (the Beatles’) is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism… In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulged amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. ‘Strawberry Fields’ suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.

Glenn Gould

Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no singers!

Gioacchino Rossini

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Wm. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

They want to love each other but they know not how.

Ferenczi Sándor

Brutalized people —dolts, dullards, clods— only see beauty in beautiful things.

Arthur Cravan

But in Atzilut, no one coughs.

Aleco ben Yankl

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.

Mike Tyson

I suspect that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges.

James Tobin, July 1984

Good food does lead to sex. As it should.

Anthony Bourdain

The scene of Skellig Michael Monastery is one so solemn and so sad that none should enter here but the pilgrim and the penitent. The sense of solitude, the vast heaven above and the sublime monotonous motion of the sea beneath would oppress the spirit, were not that spirit brought into harmony.

Lord Dunraven

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot….There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

Diane Arbus

I learned quite a lot from him, I must say. I learned that you have got to work at it. You have to rehearse. When I came back and I got the band (Earth) back together, I made sure that everybody was up early in the morning and rehearsing. I used to go and pick them up. I was the only one at the time that could drive. I used to have to drive the bloody van and get them up at quarter to nine every morning; which was, believe me, early for us then. I said to them, ‘This is how we have got to do it because this is how Jethro Tull did it.’ They had a schedule and they knew that they were going to work from this time till that time. I tried that with our band and we got into doing it. It worked. Instead of just strolling in at any hour, it made it more like we were saying, ‘Let’s do it!'

Tony Iommi on Ian Anderson

How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?
You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.

World’s second-oldest joke, Egypt, 1600 BC, believed to be about Sneferu

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

World’s oldest joke, Sumer, 1900 BC

What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?

Marcus Aurelius

That sounds good in practice, but how is it in theory?

unofficial motto, University of Chicago

To my own admittedly slanted vision, industry ranks with such sour and spinster virtues as thrift, punctuality, level-headedness, and caution.

Dot Parker

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.

Anon.

Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls).

Kingsley Amis

Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

FDR

Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue — ‘Homer, I don’t want you to do that.’ ‘Then I won’t do it.’ Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

John Swartzwelder

Diner booths are a great place to write. Try it.

idem

Look, I’ve got a high opinion of some of my songs, but to write something new you have to forget everything you’ve ever done.

Jackson Browne

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Paul Gauguin

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

The 21st C. is an æsthetic century. In history there are ages of reason and there are ages of spectacle, and it’s important to know which you’re in. Our America, our internet, is not Ancient Athens. It’s Rome. And your problem is you think you’re in the forum when you’re really in the circus.

Natalie Wynn

If the tide is coming in, it’s better to wade now than to swim—or drown—later.

Blair Braverman

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.

The Notorious Landlady

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae.To ask the proper question is half of knowing.

Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

idem

John Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.

Edward Teller

Those who wish to appear wise among fools among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… There is no equivalent of this second standard for women.

Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’

All peoples who possess a history have a paradise, a state of innocence, a golden age; indeed, every man has his paradise, his golden age, which he recalls, according as he has more or less of the poetic in his nature, with more or less inspiration.

Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there’s no money.

P. J. O’Rourke

Life is like being at the dentist. You always think the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.

Otto von Bismarck

When the Know-Nothings get control, the Declaration of Independence will read: ‘All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Abraham Lincoln

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

Marge Piercy

…a liberal too open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel…

Robert Frost

You can stipulate to a lot in this world.

Loyola Law Professor

I’ve said it before, but a good way to know who’s doing culture and who’s doing politics is that in culture you want fewer people to be like you and in politics you want more people to be like you. (Like most very online leftists, I do culture.)

Oliver Traldi

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene V. Debs

That’s what bores me about a lot of conceptual art cold, intellectual, detached-bring a book! I want the kind of lurid sadomasochistic pornography that Christian art really excels at.

Natalie Wynn

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene V. Debs

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

James Baldwin

‘You have the capacity to be so much better than you are’, Strasberg started saying to me in September of my senior year. He was still saying it in May. On the last day of classes, he said it again, and I said, How?’ and he answered, ‘Dare to fail.’ I’ve been coming through on his admonition ever since.

Aaron Sorkin

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

Arnold Schoenberg

A little bit of mediocrity can go a long way in making the exceptional appear even more remarkable.

Notion AI

Dilemmas of abundance are painful; the diseases of subsistence are deadly.

Adam Gopnik

I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.

Frank Luntz, yimakh shemo

The oppression of women is the model for all other oppressions in the world. It is the model for the oppression of Black people, it is the model for the oppression of children, it is the model for the oppression of workers by their bosses. Whenever there is a power differential, people learn how to do that because of the way women are oppressed in this society.

Saml. R. Delany

Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.

Rudyard Kipling, presaging Sturgeon’s Law by almost seventy years

You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Barbara Tuchman

Obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing.

Richard Henry Tawney, The Acquisitive Society

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.

John Ruskin

Do not think of your faults; still less of others’ faults: in every person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong: honour that; rejoice in it; and, as you can, try to imitate it.

idem

The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.

idem

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

idem

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, “the very dead of winter.” Venimus, “we are come,” if that be one,” venimus, “we are now come, come at this time, that sure is another.”

Lancelot Andrews

Act only on that maxim which is wholly optimific, not reasonably rejectable and whereby thou canst at the same time will uniquely that it should be a universal law.

Derek Parfitt, rephrased by Bluenote

There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was 15 years ago.

J. M. Coetzee

The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.

If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.

idem

But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

idem

A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.

idem

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

G. K. Chesterton

There is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch.

Wm. Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Better to grab the reins of the donkey that’s going in the correct direction than moan about not having a unicorn to ride.

Anon.

I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful idea, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.

I insisted that our cause could not expect me to be one a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. if it meant that I did not want it…

I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.

Emma Goldman

You can make your life an absolute bummer out of the inevitability of death. Or you can decide to absorb this blow and figure out a way to exist with as much energy and creativity and lack of fear as you can.

Grace Zabriskie

Have you listened to a Mort Sahl album lately? The Eisenhower stuff is a little weak.

Norm MacDonald

‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again.

‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’

Charles Dickens

I’ll tell you what, gentlemen. The Punch may not be quite so good as you could wish, but by God if you mend it at all, you’ll entirely spoil it.

Dr Walsh

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

David Graeber

There’s something magical about watching clips from the first couple seasons of “Nigella Bites” when her first husband was still alive. There is an immediacy and hope and vitality brought on by the specter of death, almost as though she knew that things might never ever be as good again and she wanted to make everything as good as it could be — not perfect, and not eternally so, but to live as fully as she possibly could with as much love and joy as they could muster in that fragile moment. and given when it was, the years leading up to 2001, the last time when neoliberalism actually seemed like it could work, right before the dot-com bubble, 9/11, Bush, social media, everything that’s happened since, it makes me think that for all of us, if we could go back right then, we’d be shouting at ourselves, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may; this is as good as it’s going to be for a long time!”

Bluenote

in the last decade or so, we somehow traded biological essentialism with social essentialism. and, somehow, thought that was progress, lol.

josh!, @queersocialism

I pray thee, peace. I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently.

Wm. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato

One can conquer a kingdom on horseback; to rule it, one must dismount.

Mongol proverb

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.

Robert Caro

I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want be an asshole.

via Penn Jillette

I shall geat a fart of a dead man as soone As a farthyng of him.

Heywood

And not let your evil inclination assure you that the grave will be a place of refuge for you — for against your will you were created, against your will you were born, against your will you live, against your will you die, and against your will you are destined to give an account before the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One Blessed be He.

Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), 4:29

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.

Aldous Huxley

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Uncommonplace

Prolegomenon