Human
history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H.G. Wells
I'm sure the
reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because
they have no
contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
-- Petronius, _The Satyricon_
I cannot
afford to waste my time making money.
--
Jean Louis Agassiz
I do not
suppose that a Man loses his Time, who is not engaged in publick
Affairs, or
in an illustrious Course of Action. On the contrary, I believe our
Hours may
very often be more profitably laid out in such Transactions as make
no Figure in
the World, than in such as are apt to draw upon them the Attention
of Mankind.
One may become wiser and better by several Methods of Employing
one's self
in Secrecy and Silence, and do what is laudable without Noise or
Ostentation.
-- Joseph Addison, in the Spectator for
March 4, 1712
Love isn't
an act, it's a whole life.
It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you
and she will
still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and
futures --
when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love -- why, I'll tell
you what
love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you
listening
for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden
silence, a
sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.
-- Brian Moore, _The Luck of Ginger
Coffey_
Intelligence
is derived from two words--inter and legere -- inter meaning
'between'
and legere meaning 'to choose.' An intelligent person, therefore, is
one who has
learned 'to choose between.' He knows that good is better than
evil, that
confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate,
that
gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance,
compassion
than arrogance, and that truth has more virtue than ignorance.
-- J. Martin Klotsche
When you
have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person,
you know
that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces
surrounding
him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night
you cast, by
the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
-- Albert Camus
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
See how
ignorant you are of your own self; there is no land so distant or so
unknown to
you, nor one about which you will so easily believe falsehoods.
-- Guigo, _Meditations_ (circa 1110-1116)
It's a
unification of a Pythagorean sense of perfection which in its
mathematical
exactitude recalls what is divine. We realize that the world has
been
ordained, that it is ordered, that it does make sense, that it has been
thought of,
and behind every imperfect form that we see, there is a perfect
form that
has been badly imitated in our mortal world.
--
Peter Sellars, on music, quoted in _A World Of Ideas II_
There are
books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some
reader's
hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is
one of those
books.
-- George Santayana
The brain
thinks not by adding two and two to make four, but like a sheet of
wet paper on
which drops of watercolour paints are being splashed, merging into
unforeseen
configurations.
-- Guy Claxton, _Hare Brain, Tortoise
Mind_
Only the
person who has been trained to think can be trusted to feel.
-- Ambrose Bierce
We are so
accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become
disguised to
ourselves.
--
La Rochefoucauld
There's
nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at
the right
time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach
Romans
disapproved of Greek sports because the athletes competed nude. That was
shocking. On
the other hand, people dripping with blood and dying for
entertainment
was fine. This is strangely similar to the moral standards of
today's
commercial television and family movies.
-- John Ralston Saul, _On Equilibrium_
For the
difference between art and entertainment is, finally, one not so much
of direction
as of degree: though all entertainment is not art, all art must
include
entertainment. "Entertaining" means interest-holding, and what bores
and fails to
involve has no real artistic value. Granted, art makes demands; it
entertains
those who are willing and able to feel, perceive, and think more
deeply and
arduously -- more courageously if you will -- rather than those who
always want
to leave their thoughts behind, most likely because thought has
abandoned
them.
-- John Simon
I find
television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go
into the
other room and read a book.
-- Groucho Marx
Once a new
technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller,
you're part
of the road.
-- Stewart Brand, _The Media Lab_
The road
ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The main point
is to get
those mistakes made and recognized as fast as possible!
-- John A. WheelerOnce a new technology
rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller,
you're part
of the road.
-- Stewart Brand, _The Media Lab_
The road
ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The main point
is to get
those mistakes made and recognized as fast as possible!
-- John A. Wheeler
I never make
stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
Some people
have so much respect for their superiors they have none left for
themselves.
-- Peter McArthur
The
inventors of genius hasten the march
of
civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
-- Gustave Le Bon
There are
too many people, and too few human beings.
-- Robert Zend
If you
haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a
day.
-- John A. Wheeler
To be
pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
-- Goethe
In business
school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a nonworld.
-- Peter Drucker
Having
discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe
death as a
cure.
-- George McGovern
