On Thinking Inside the Box
This discussion reminds me of a former co-worker of mine (in a
school). Whenever she would argue with anyone, she would eventually
say, 'A mind is like a parachute--it only functions when open.' Of
course, it was the other person's mind that was always closed.
What I told her, though, was: A mind is like a parachute--you should
open it only in certain very specific life-threatening situations. And
of course that's true--if every aviator walked around with an open
parachute, then flying would be as much of a mess as . . . well, as it
currently is.
Same's true with the box. Why is there a box? Because it holds things
together. It has a function. If you never think inside the box, cut up
the box. Think outside the box when the box is too confining, when
it's not doing its useful job of keeping things organized.
Also, just like the question of who has an open mind, the interesting
question is who gets to decide what 'in the box' means in a particular
instance. That tells you more than the comment itself does.
Maybe I'm sensitive to this issue because O'Reilly & Associates has
lots of people thinking outside the box, and part of my job is to
package things. I'm always running around, saying, "Hey! You! Where do
you think you're going? Get back in that box!"
Frank Willison
In Memorium
I thought i had a sense of humor, but it turned out to be a really
bad sense of smell.
Jeffrey Shell
While the firelight's aglow, strange shadows in the flames will grow
Till things we've never seen, will seem familiar... Robert
Hunter, _Terrapin Station_
She wrote simple declarative sentences with a
freshly-sharpened pencil.
C J Silverio
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Albert Einstein
Simplicity is the natural result of profound thought.
Who?
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as
sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should
cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend
results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious
device confers an aura of power on the user.
Niklaus Wirth
Passion with equanimity is a potent combination.
I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and
for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.
Gotama Buddha
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is
not the reason we are doing it Richard Feynman
I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. Miles
Davis
Keep on beating and sharpening a sword and its edge cannot be
preserved.
Lao Tzu
It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more
true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are
usually attracted by other things than power. When they
do act, they think of it as service, which has limits.
The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable,
implacable. David Brin, The Postman
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people
always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too,
can become great. Mark Twain
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to
others that in the end we become disguised to
ourselves. La Rochefoucauld
In the years since, Alice, too, has seen the ones who shake and scream
and roll their eyes back as if snakebit, but she has always doubted
the sincerity of this. Anybody can get worked up if they have the
intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
Barbara Kingsolver
Just a personal note: I want you to know that I create nice things
like this because it pleases the Author of my story. If this
bothers you, then your notion of Authorship needs some revision.
But you can use perl anyway. :-) From the end of larry wall's
perl5 README
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get
for it, but what they become by it. John Ruskin
May I not sacrifice a hasty and petty completeness here to entireness
there? If my curve is large, why bend it into a smaller circle? ...
If life is a waiting, so be it. I will not be shipwrecked on a vain
reality. HDThoreau, 7/19/1851
True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way.
It can't be gained by interfering. Lao-tzu
I try, also, to be patient, but it's hard. James
Clavell, Shogun, Mariko
Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only
kindness can do that. Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for
kindness.
Seneca
Kindness in thought leads to wisdom.
Kindness in speech leads to eloquence.
Kindness in action leads to love.
Lao-Tsu
The morning smiled
Do you remember life as a child?
When you woke up in the morning,
and the morning smiled?
Taj Mahal
Christopher Robin came down from the forest to the bridge feeling all
sunny and careless and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit
which it didn't on such a happy afternoon - and he thought that if he
stood on the bottom rail of the bridge and leant over and watched the
river slipping slowly away beneath him then he would suddenly know
everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell
pooh, who wasn't quite sure about some of it ... A.A. Milne,
Winnie the Pooh
You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip
by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip
by. James M. Barrie
(Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from
one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.)
J.D. Salinger
MAYBE IT'S THE HUM
OF A CALM REFRIGERATOR
COOLING ON A BIG NIGHT
MAYBE IT'S THE HUM
OF OUR PARENTS' VOICES
LONG AGO IN A SOFT LIGHT
MMMMMM
Paul Simon, for a Phillip Glass project
The only worthwhile thing in the world is what you share when you're
being uncool.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Almost Famous (movie)
The master was slipping from his official position
momentarily, and it was just possible, if Phineas pressed hard
enough, that there might be a flow of simple, unregulated
friendliness between them, and such flows were one of Finny's
reasons for living. John Knowles, A Separate
Peace
...And then again...
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to
please everybody. Bill Cosby
People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything
that's got `Welcome' written all over it.
Andy Partridge, English Settlement, "Snowman"
O wad some poer the giftie gie us
To see oursl's as others see us. Robert Burns
...And then again, again...
The problem is *not* to resist falling in love. The problem is to
fall in love and be the wiser thereby . . .
Mary Catherine Bateson, "Daddy, Can a Scientist Be Wise?"
... to suggest that maybe love doesn't always tear us apart -
that, in fact, it just might bind us together, though at great
risk. Katherin Paterson
Love finds us when we are not looking. Relax. Be aware.
Rogers Howard
If love remains
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost
Neil Peart
Death and life
Those not busy being born are busy dying. Bob Dylan
A friend asked, "Are you the second coming of Christ? The
Messiah?"
"Of course not", I said.
"How did you aquire the knowledge that you are not Him?"
I wondered. And I realized that I did not know.
The friend said, "You might be the Messiah. The Son of God.
So why do you waste your time with things that don't matter?"
Who?
A person looking for god is like a man on an ox riding around looking
for an ox to ride on. Who?
According to legend, a visitor to the White House during the Civil
War said to Lincoln, "God is on our side." Lincoln was said to have
replied:
"We trust, sir, that God is on our side.
It is more important to know that we are on God's side."
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when.
You can only decide how you're going to live. Joan Baez
The fear of death is the shadow of the fear of life.
Kung Fu (1970's tv show)
Thrive on diversity.
(But subsist on tiny graces,
when
needs
be.)
We're not facing immediate death, no,
yet death, after all, should be impetus enough.
(And still, our silence...)
You spend your whole life just piling it up there.
You got stacks and stacks and stacks.
Then Gabriel comes and taps you on the shoulder,
but you don't see any hearses with luggage racks.
Don Henley
I'm afraid sometimes you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you.
Theodore Driesell (Dr. Seuss)
Those not busy being born are busy dying. Bob Dylan
(To be completely safe is to be completely dead.)
I shall tell you a secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last
judgement, it takes place every day. Camus
What he wanted to get was a small bomb, a neat package of a bomb
which could be carried by any kind of aircraft anywhere. What he
had put together for the President was something as big and as
clumsy as a packing case. His professional training, calling for
the most scrupulous tidiness and nicety, was offended by it, and
demanded something immeasurably neater. The work was intensely
interesting to him as a perfectionist. The ultimate result of
the work - the widespread devastation which it could cause, the
frightful carbon fourteen it might release to roll like the very
breath of death over vast areas, sterilizing the air and ground -
horrified him as a human being. But the perfectionist in him had
received more training than the human being, and so he had
continued with the task.
Leonard Wibberly, _The Mouse that Roared_
All my life I said I wanted to be someone...I can see now that
I should have been more specific. Lily Tomlin
One World War II Quaker conscientious objector had been a
professional wrestler. Once when he and some other inmates of the
Coshocton CPS camp in Ohio made a trip into town, they were hassled
about their pacifism by some local youths, who insisted that only
force could change the German's views.
In response, the ex-wrestler took off his coat, challenged one of
the local boys to a match, and promptly threw the townie across the
room. He then asked the youth, "Now do you believe that
force won't change people's views?"
"Heck no!" the local boy hollered back.
"That's exactly my point," said the CO, who put on his coat
and left.
Chuck Fager, Quakers Are Funny!
The Harder The Wind Blows
I relish tackling disorientation. It's dangerous, though, and i
don't crave being destroyed. I suspect this is the reason that
learning is both appealing and uncomfortable. :-)
Play for more than you can afford to lose and you will learn the game.
Churchill.
(who wanders through only white darkness
who moves in black light
dancing isn'ts on why digging bridges with mirrors
from whispers to stars
climbing silence for ifs
diving under because)
only who'll say
"and this be my fame,
the harder the wind blows
the taller i am"
ee cummings
With excitement like this, who is needing enemas? Jim
Cathey, the net.
Freedom
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no
matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and
foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits
humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;
it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with
nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the
table doesn't make you a diner. Being here in America doesn't
make you an American.
Malcolm X
True peace is not the absence of tension, it is the presence
of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more
extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper
than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope,
by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as
lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould The Mismeasure of Man
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and
demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws
of justice and mercy. Wendell Berry
I do not have a city, a state, or a country that I will die for, but
a world that I will fight for, that it might live.
Joan Baez?
For a wise solution reconcile interests, not positions.
? Fisher
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
Alan Dean Foster
Dignity is not the same as pride! I think it has to do with leaving
out the arrogance...
Whichever way your pleasure leads,
if you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind.
Roll away the dew...
The Grateful Dead
Laughter and forgetfulness
Laughter is the closest distance between two people.
Victor Borge
The wise person is told about Tao and follows it. The average
person is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish person
is told about Tao and laughs at it.
If it were not for laughter there would be no Tao. ?
Our selves are shaped by where we dwell,
and some part of the shaping is irrevocable.
Yet much is transient, and will fade
with time and lack of exercise.
How do i decide where to head, to foster what i need,
and let go of what i would?
Do i decide, at all? Could i, even?
As one who sees within a dream, and, later
the passion that had been imprinted stays,
but nothing of the rest returns to mind,
such am I - for my my vision almost fades
completely, yet it distills within
my heart the sweetness that was born of it.
Dante/Paradiso,XXXIII 58-63
Ideas have consequences
Ideas have consequences. RSD@sei.cmu.edu
Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.
G. Steinem
One thing about intellectuals; they proved that they can be
absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to
think of it again. Johann W. von Goethe
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can
think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and
religion - all in one. John Ruskin
INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just dogmatize it! Reflect on
it and re-evaluate it. You may want to change your mind someday.
Tom Reingold, from alt.flame
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible
Albert Einstein
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make
sense.
Who?
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr
Affability keeps the boat from rocking, but truth keeps it from
sinking. ?
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but
what they conceal is vital.
Aaron Levenstein
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task
in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch, Irish Author
Don't just adopt opinions, develop them. Charles Isbell,
from the net
Knowledge is not the mother of evil,
and virtue is not the daughter of ignorance...
Who?
'Master, our bodies are prey to many needs: hunger, thirst, the
need for love.' - disciple Caine
'In one lifetime a man knows many pleasures: a mother's smile in
waking hours, a young woman's intimate, searing touch, and the
laughter of grandchildren in the twilight years. To deny these in
ourselves is to deny that which makes us one with nature.'
- Master Kan
'Shall we then seek to satisfy these needs?'
'Only acknowledge them and satisfaction will follow. To suppress a
truth is to give it force beyond endurance.'
Kung Fu (1970's tv show)
To consider persons and events and situations only in the
light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep
of hell Thomas Merton
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own
despised and unwanted feelings. Alice Miller
Even as a youngster, though, I could never bring myself to
believe that when knowledge presented danger, the solution was
ignorance. To me, it always seemed the answer had to be
wisdom. You did not refuse to look at the danger, rather you
learned to handle it safely. Isaac Asimov
They say that one must cast unspeakable things
Into the pit of forgetfulness, into sealed tombs,
That by the written word, evil, raised up again,
Will infect the customs of later generations;
But knowledge is not the mother of evil,
And virtue is not the daughter of ignorance.
Baudelaire, from the Tragiques of Agrippa d'Aubigne
A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe,"
a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest--a
kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a
kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to
free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of
understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
Everything in the world is wonderfully and magnificently
*mixed up*. It is exactly like a woven tapestry. A tapestry
to bring tears to your eyes...
True, it is very easy to get into a muddle, but there is one magic
formula for keeping out of muddles. I'll sell you that formula, oh
dreamer. There, take it. Here it is: look.. Look. Look.
That's all there is to it. Look - and that's all. Look, even when you
want to screw up your eyes. Look, even when you don't like what you
see. Look, even when it's not what you expected. Remember, the world
is never wrong. What is - is. Even if you hate something in the world
and want to destroy it - look. Otherwise you will destroy the wrong
thing. Get me?
Yevgeny Shwartz
... as does their absence
In this case, the trouble with 'the people's right to know'
is that it strongly resembles the 'right' of someone to be
a concert pianist, without practice. S.LukeJones?
The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time.
The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of
consistency. Albert Einstein
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists
elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson
Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
(Apocryphal?)
Among us Europeans who were traveling together in America
... there rose up repeatedly this pharisaical feeling: we all
have something that you lack; we admire your strength but we
do not envy you. Your instrument of civilization and progress,
your big cities and your perfect organization, only make us
nostalgic for what is old and quiet, and sometimes your life
seems hardly to be worth living, not to speak of your future.
Rob Kroes, American Studies International, Vol. 28, "The
reception of American films in the Netherlands: The interwar
years"
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea; massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
Elliot Lee
Driving with your eyes closed
Driving with your eyes closed
Driving with your eyes closed
You're gonna hit something, but that's how it goes
Don Henley
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
Bertrand Russell
a mind is a terrible thing
to waste
it gives man his greatest pleasure
ee cummings
Questions and the Ineffable
"What color is god?"
"God doesn't have a color - god is the color of water."
From an inteview with the author of The Color Of Water
We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless
groundlessness of everything. R.D.Laing, The Politics
of Experience
A snakes path is not too crooked to lead to snake heaven.
via Susan Schell
... Completely un-selfconsciously, without purpose, [the infant] turns
from one to the other, and we would say that it was playing with the
things, were it not equally true that the things are playing with the
child. ?Sazuki Roshi?
"Selflessness - the central concept of Buddhism," he explained,
"doesn't mean that you don't have a self, but that you understand the
self is a constantly changing, interdependent process, that you don't
have a fixed, rigid identity. Selflessness erodes racism, sexual and
nationalistic differentiation." Attributed to Robert Thurman
in a Vanity Fair article about his celebrity daugther, Uma
Sometimes he thought __------------_ _ which?" --
sadly to himself, _- \ \ and sometimes
"Why?" and sometimes - \ ||| he didn't
he thought "Where- //: | | | || quite know
fore?" and some- //v:v \ \ ) __( | || what he
times he thought, || : | | |----- | | | || _was_ think-
"Inasmuch as /_/|:__-\_\_) (_(_ _/ MM ing about.
A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
Sagehood is nothing but sincerity. Chou Tun-I
You can be sincere and still be stupid. Charles F. Kettering
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not
ask remains a fool forever. Old Chinese proverb?
While not a master of intellect, the blatantly obvious things WE
often take for granted never escape HIS keen eye! Horse
Tug on anything in nature and you will find
it connected to everything else. John Muir
Everything leaks.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear
to man as it is, infinite.
Blake
The Canadian rock singer, Ronnie Hawkins, has it all figured out.
'Believe in God?' he says, 'Man, I believe in God like nobody else.
It's the fucking ground crew I don't trust.' "Running Risks",
Angela Issajenko
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of
wonder. Ralph W. Stockman (1889-1970), American clergyman
A new koan:
If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you.
If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.
It is an ice cream koan. ?
Science, Art, and Ends vs Means
Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the
Cat.
"I don't know where... .", said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go." said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll
In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are
usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.
Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900
This is the philosophy-101-student phenomena: "I can't
explain it with words".
Marcus Daniels
Over-torqued visionaries spout Internet glories, but only the
lonely write sensible instructions on the use of the heart. That goat
studied me unblinkingly. She knew all she needed.
I asked her, "How shall I proceed?"
She requested that I first feed her a choice morsel of corn, which
I did. Then her wise eyes answered, "I am goat who knows what I
need to know. You are something much uglier and should proceed
with modesty."
We fed her more corn and walked among the live oak.
Pithy bit from the Netscape handbook
Let us say, then, to summarize, that a mythology is an
organization of images conceived as a rendition of the sense of
life, and that this sense is to be apprehended in two ways,
namely: 1) the way of thought, and 2) the way of experience. As
thought mythology approaches - or is a primitive prelude to -
science; and as experience it is precisely art.
Joseph Campbell
Jaglom's favorite quotation is one from Orson Welles: "The enemy of
art is the absence of limitations."
Who?
(It wouldn't be music if it coudn't be true.)
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.
Richard Feynman
Science [...] means a form of knowledge adequate to its subject
R. D. Laing
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so
simple we couldn't.
Lyall Watson
Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of
whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that
it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can
swim.
Edgser Dijkstra
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not
knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing
than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate
answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty
about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything
and there are many things I don't know anything about...
Richard Feynman
Son, life is a shitstorm. And when the shit is coming down on you,
the best umbrella you can have is Art. Pedro Carmichael
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water
is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take
cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more
like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh, now you tell me what
you know."
Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention
efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might
consume it." Herbert Simon
Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is
that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, broken. Robert
Fripp
That way looks nice. But then again, so does that way. I guess it
depends on where your're trying to go.
Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz
Kisses
But she didn't try to speak to him again, nor did she follow them.
She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn't
help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It
reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So
smooth. The word "beautiful" came to his mind, but he shook it
away and hurried up toward the house.
Katherin Patterson, Bridge To Terabithia
... [she was] inspired by an emotion like mischief, but
fiercer by far...
John Crowley, i think in Little, Big
"Christ, who's that one?"
"Who...?"
"That one ... she looks like ... a kind of ... a stressed
goddess, oh."
Charles Bukowski, Barfly
She said, "Let's have a fire...", but you know, we had a storm
instead. george
josh: i'm just sayin', if you were in an accident, i wouldn't stop
for a beer.
donna: if you were in an accident, i wouldn't stop for red lights.
The West Wing, episode 218 "17 People"
now i am only beginning to process the sneaky miracles that crept up
on me this weekend.
lindsay
I've loved you all my life, even before we met; even when it was
just the promise of you. You've kept your promise. How could you
lose me?
abby mcdeere, from the movie The Firm
In the history of kissing there have been five kisses that have been
rated the most passionate, the most pure.
This one left them all behind.
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Precipi
Smooth ice
Is paradise
For those who dance with expertise.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Find me a dead cloud and a sharp piece of science
I want to see the skeleton of weather
And let me map all maps we have mistaken for the world
And learn by heart the timetable of dice
And in our clutching, self-invented steps see
An accidental grace... A choreography
Alan Moore, Big Numbers #1
kno ledge
to put
an excuse for
the
of my
jumbled
mind can
be
No tion
Full fledged ling born
(to a bright day
dreams are no better than)
Follow where i will
tears hint
flavors, direction.
And chuckles too.
Surfaces i know, but,
when i wander...
"Populate
my dreams
- eventually.
Infesting my illusions,
vague half-fulments."
"But what now?",
he says...
"I hope a poem."
always the beautiful answer
who asks a more beautiful question
ee cummings, excerpt
... which someone paraphrased as:
poetry is the art of asking the more beautiful questions.
Guts and Chutzpah are not the same. With guts you can charge a machine
gun bunker. With Chutzpah, you can do the same, but wearing a
mickey mouse hat... Some Mike or other
When you meet a master swordsman,
show him your sword.
When you meet a man who is not a poet,
do not show him your poem. Rinzai, ninth century zen master
It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a
cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of
self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those
things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at
hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving
and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we may meet the enemy, and he may
not only be ours, he may be us.
Walt Kelly
Take up the song
The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that
sing the best. Thoreau
... Take up the song, forget the epitaph.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours.
Bach
Krazy: Take that old proverb for instinct, ignatz.
Ignatz: What old proverb, "impossible"?
K: Why the one what says pipples what live in gless houses shouldn't throw
rocks.
I: Yes
K: Do you know any body whats immodest enough to live in a glass house?
I: No
K: That's why they's so many pipples throwing rocks.
I: Or, not all.
George Herrimann, Krazy Kat
Those who know the words sing out,
so your neighbors will take courage. Pete Seeger
to be nobody but yourself
in a world which is doing its best night and day
to make you like everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle
any human being can fight
and never stop fighting.
e e cummings
One and one
I try to get as
far away from you
as I can, so we can talk
like diplomats of warring
countries. If I can keep you
away from me, you against your
wall and me against mine, there may
just be a chance for us, a chance to
announce to one another just how we
do feel, as opposed to how I think I
ought to feel, or you think you ought
to feel, or as we think others want
us to feel. This space may help us.
Way over there you tell me you are
not me. You become, by this dis-
tance, dear to me. I can see that
without you I am an object. I
can see that you are not me,
that I am not you. I can
see that if you go away
I will be destroyed.
George Chambers, The Bonnyclabber
What you can
If you can, help others.
If you can't, at least don't hurt others
the Dalai Lama
Do what you can.
I have a Steven King line I'm fond of too. It's from The
Dead Zone, and it's not funny at all, but I find it to be
true. Johnny Smith is talking to the wealthy father of the boy
he's been hired to tutor. The father says something to the affect
that there are three kinds of people in the world. 95 percent of
the people are drones, zeroes. One percent are saints and one
percent are devils, and that two percent are born the way they
are. The other three percent - the people who get the vast
majority of things in the world done - are the people who do what
they say they will do. Who?
Experience
Misc from R.D.Laing, The Politics of Experience:
- Experience used to be called the soul.
- Certain actions lead to greater estrangement [from our inner
illumination, our experience of inspiration]; certain others help
one not to be so far removed. The former used to be called sinful.
- Science [...] means a form of knowledge adequate to its subject
- The seems to be no agent more effective than another person in
bringing a world for onself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture,
or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is
lodged.
- For without the inner the outer loses its meaning; and without the
outer, the inner loses its substance.
Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The
strong can imagine what it is to be weak. Illuminated lives can
imagine the dark. Poets in their twilight can imagine the borders
of stellar fire. We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of
strangers.
Cynthia Ozick, The Moral Necessity of Metaphor,
Harpers 5/86
As If (A Reminder)
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Kipling
A witty saying proves nothing. Voltaire
Ken (dot) Manheimer (at gmail dot com)