OK, I finally Got these off my palm, and have a couple to add (1/17/06), so I figured I'd actually post this, instead of leaving it as a post it note to myself in the "Save as Draft" bin of my life. This was posted as the original date when I collected some of the quotes. They are organized somewhat arbitrarily in terms of what I feel the purpose of my having them is.
Anti-Torah
We do not, even on the road, associate with our enemies. -Aristotle, Treatise on Government
The men of the Middle Ages (had)
almost no conceptions of genuine science or history, but instead the abstract system of scholastic logic and philosophy, highly ingenious but highly fantastic...
-Robert Huntington Fletcher, A History of English Literature
"...One more drink, could you make it strong, because I don't need to think..." -Dave Matthews Band, the Lilly white recordings, song 5
"The idea that everything else is in motion and up above is the only fixed point in the universe...
Most of the chapter,
...I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. "
-Umberto Eco, Focault's Pendulum 37% of the way through, chapter 37
He that is not against us, is with us; that is, if the points fundamental and of substance in religion, were truly discerned and distinguished, from points not merely of faith, but of opinion, order, or good intention. -Francis Bacon, Essays
"To an unusual degree in the Renaissance good walked with evil in a wondrous development of arts combined with political and moral degradation... " -Barbara Touchman, The March of Folly, pg. 66-7
Gnostic
" The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with oneÂ’s own conscience is perfidy." -Darkness at Noon
"Even Nothing cannot last forever." -Neil Gaiman, American Gods
" 'Yes'? What kind of an answer is 'Yes'?" "It's a good answer. True answer, too." -Neil Gaiman, American Gods
"as propositions embellish a conception, so reservations make it vital, while mysterious connections give it density; considerations make it profound; emphases uplift, allusions dissimulate, transmutations make subtle." -Umberto Eco, Island of the day before
"There are no ways of saying certain things, and others are so difficult that a man pines and dies before the right words are found. One must borrow phrases from the sky, words from beyond the stars. Else were all an ignorant, imprisoning mockery." -the adept, in fafhrd and the grey mouser, book 3, by
Deep
In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby. -Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
I've never been so alone, and I've never been so alive.
-Third Eye Blind, Motorcycle Drive By
"In my nightmare I feel so alive and I..." -Eve 6
"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. -from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis, American Gods, Neil Gaiman
"Instead of reading a poem, I could be a poem. Do i dare?" -matt eidenfeld
"We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are." -Anais Nin
Our crazy world
"I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia." -neal postman, amusing ourselves to death
Men create oppositions, which are not; and put them into new terms, so fixed, as whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning. -Francis Bacon, Essays
"Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don't get the message from the tube, we get it through other people." - George Gerbner
"The best Support of an Arbitrary Power is undoubtedly Ignorance, and this cannot be better cultivated than by an Absolute Denial of Printing; the Oppressions of the Popularity cannot be thoroughly Stated, or Liberty in general Propagated without the use of the Press in some measure ...
the Hands of the Patriots and Men of Eminence who should Illuminate the Age, and open the Eyes of the deluded People are thereby tied up, and the Infelicity of the Populace so compleat that they are incapable of either seeing their approaching Misery, or" -Daniel Defoe- A Vindication of the Press (missing the huxleyan irrelevance idea - destroying thought through entertainment)
"He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders-fear and greed-and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be. " -Liar's Poker, michael lewis
"Since Alexander wasn't constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were. (The occupational hazard of his role was an ugly elitism; you begin to think everyone else is stupid.)" -Liar's Poker, michael lewis
"Many of these investors would not know they wanted to sell risk on the German bond market until we suggested it to them with our new warrant, just as most people didn't know they wanted to plug their ears all day and listen to Pink Floyd until Sony produced the Walkman." -liar's poker
"Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic. ..." -Darkness at Noon
"In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." -Fear and loathing in las vegas
"we, on the contrary, born of an honourable tribe and family and living in the midst of our fellow-citizens, we have fled from our country as hard as ever we could go. It's not that we hate it; we recognize it to be great and rich, likewise that everyone has the right to ruin himself paying taxes;" -the birds, by aristophanes
Anti-Chochma
"To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is." -Darkness at Noon
The past could always be anihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could always do that. But the future was inevitable. -dorian gray, by oscar wilde
"that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another." -king rat, china mieville
"Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you, everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable--and unimportant?" -Peter Keating, Ayn Rand, Fountainhead
"ridicule was a better defense than truth" Dragonquest, Anne McCaffrey
Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the blackmail of certainty. -Umberto Eco, Focault's Pendulum
"Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy"
-H. H. Goddard, pg 237, Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal, 1919
"Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other." -Neil Gaiman, American Gods
"Good health is priceless. So are old people's votes" -PJ O'Rourke, the atlantic, oct 04, pg56
"Years later [Billy Bean] would say that when he'd decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life. ...He didn't mind living with money at the center of his life, so long as he was using it on other people, and not having it used on him." -Moneyball
"They can't do that; it ain't legal. There's a law against it. A higher law. Well you're doing it too, he reminded himself. Yeah, but I'm on important business. Besides, I'm an elitist."-The monkey wrench gang, edward abbey
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst\Are full of passionate intensity" -WB Yeats
Math
"as to the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns, besides that they embrace only matters highly abstract, and, to appearance, of no use, the former is so exclusively restricted to the consideration of figures, that it can exercise the understanding only on condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination;and, in the latter, there is so complete a subjection to certain rules and formulas, that there results an art full of confusion and obscurity calculated to embarrass, instead of a science fitted to cultivate the mind. " -Descartes, Discourse on Reason
History
"The Roman Empire was not an age of vigorous and progressive thought. It did singularly little to advance knowledge on any of the paths that the Greeks had opened up." -The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood, pg38
"When and where in history had there ever been such defective saints? Whenever had a good cause been worse represented? If the Party embodied the will of history, then history itself was defective... The cause of the Party’s defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century... Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked." -Darkness at Noon
"They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled." -Darkness at Noon
“A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people—one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation.” -Rubashov, Darkness at Noon
"When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good." - DIETRICH VON NIEHEIM, BISHOP OF VERDEN: De schismate libri III, A.D. 1411
"But how can the present decide what will be judged truth in the future? We are doing the work of prophets without their gift. We replaced vision by logical deduction; but although we all started from the same point of departure, we came to divergent results. Proof disproved proof, and finally we had to recur to faith—to axiomatic faith in the rightness of one’s own reasoning."-Rubashov, Darkness at Noon
Torah
Perhaps they are logically inconsistent; perhaps if they were deeper philosophers, they would be worse people. -Harav Aaron Lichtenstein, By His Light (about goyim with morality)
"[r. sheinberg isn't a genius, he ... put his feet in ice water to stay awake]" -Harav Pinkus's (Who wrote Shabbos Malachta) father
Chochma
- “Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.” Stephen Jay Gould
"Love is like a lot of things, it is always best done with the head. Save mindless efforts for mindless things. " -Raymond Feist, Magician (Master)
"Few arguements are more dangerous than the ones that simply 'feel' right, but can't be justified" -S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, pg 157
"That," said Wednesday, driving off, "is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant." -Neil Gaiman, American Gods
"I was overwhelmed by his combination of intellectual power and human warmth - I had often encountered these seperately, but I had not too often encountered them together" -Johnathan Sacks, Awakenings, Forward to the 1990 edition, xxxvi
"Everyone's a hero if you want to be! Everyone's a prisoner holding their own key!" -journeys (80s rock?)
matchbox 20, entirety of song 6-more than you want to be.
"After all, it is possible I may be mistaken; and it is but a little copper and glass, perhaps, that I take for gold and diamonds. I know how very liable we are to delusion in what relates to ourselves, and also how much the judgments of our friends are to be suspected when given in our favor." -Descartes, Discourse on Reason
"It is not in the nature of man--nor of any living entity--to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential." Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition
"Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose...Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal." -Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
"The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing." Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
"This idea--that there is a content called "the news of the day"--was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed.Thee news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination" Neall postman, amusing ourselves to death
"He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous the more he fed them" -The picture ofDoriann gray
"Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, _magical_ and more, to whosoever will _think_ of it." -Thomas Carlyle, Heros and hero worship
"Whatever isseparatedd dies" -Atlantic Monthly, Issue 44, Whittier, pg 333, 1864
"Be yourself, is all that you can do" -Audioslave, Be Yourself
"Live among men as if god beheld you; speak to god as if men were listening" -Seneca
We are going to the moon, that is not very far.
Man has so much farther to go within himself. -Anais Nin
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all,
there is only the meaning we each give to our life,
an individual meaning, an individual plot,
like an individual novel, a book for each person. -Anais Nin
Funny
"I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead)" -Neil Gaiman, American Gods
In fact—if I may digress for a moment (and if you don’t want me to digress, then you may find that you are reading the wrong [book])
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Even in Japan, where national pastimes include ripping out your own intestines with a knife, I think they would draw the line.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasnÂ’t the forces of natural selection that designed fish, it must have been an Italian.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
A Bach fugue, on the other hand, is pure form, beauty, and playfulness, and IÂ’m not sure that very much, in terms of human art and achievement, lies beyond a Bach fugue. Maybe the quaelectrodynamicnamic theory of light. Maybe Uncle Fred Flits By, I donÂ’t know.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Madagascar is an island—a very large island: much, much larger than your hat, but not as large as the moon.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
"But if an explanation is where the mind comes to rest, the mind that stopped at "lucky" when it sought to explain the Oakland A's recent pitching success bordered on narcoleptic." -moneyball
"I am constantly reminded of television's value as a source of comfort and pleasure to the elderly, the infirm and, indeed, all people who find themselves alone in motel roNeal" -neal postman, amusing ourselves to death
"Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs help. Speed is the ultimate drug and rockets run on alcohol." -The monkey wrenchEdward edward abbey
(12:34:24) NeverWorker: tell your prof. that java is for homosexuals and the mentally retarded.
(12:35:13) NeverWorker: also, it's got to be some form of aveira m'doraisa. -AIM Conversation
(13:05:29) NeverWorker: he says that he can't mIsrael israel unless he finds a "job" so he can "feed his wife" or some such nonsense. -AIM Conversation
"The more rabbits you collect, the more powerful you
will be as a mathematician." -Chan-Ho Suh, a 5th year math graduate student at UC-Davis.
0 comments:
Post a Comment