Quotes

Another selection from my perusals, in no special sequence …
I chortled so immoderately I filled my codpiece with widdle.
[Katy Wheatley]
To say ‘I wonder’ is to say ‘I question; I ask.’ The mind seeks. Sometimes it finds answers, sometimes it does not. We need wonder in order to keep moving and growing – to stay alive to the world. It gives us meaning and, in fact, makes us human.
[Marian Bantjes; I Wonder]
It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophise, and still leads them.
[Aristotle; Metaphysics]
I’m not weird, I’m limited edition.
[unknown]
I may be a little weird, but I’d rather be weird and right than normal and wrong.
[Paul Stamets, Mycologist]
In the realm of medicine, sham treatments have long had a name: placebos. I suggest we call the equivalent treatments in society “placebos at large”. In fact I want to make the analogy with placebo medicine still closer. In much the same way that we have “invented” witch doctors to provide spells and potions that allow us to overcome the timidity of our bodily healing systems and cure ourselves of physical disease, so we have created witch institutions, witch ceremonies, witch arts to cure ourselves of incipient mental and social disease.
[Nicholas Humphrey, “Placebos at large: the power of society’s symbols”, New Scientist; 03 August 2013]
Life is a disease; sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal
[unknown]
“You see, I don’t mind what happens” … To “accept” the way things are is to stop resisting reality; to stop using positive thinking to try to pretend things are different. Put like that, acceptance seems like a precondition for change, not an obstacle to it.
[Oliver Burkeman writing about Kristnamurti in the Guardian, 10 August 2013]
No event can trigger upset without a belief that it’s undesirable.
[Oliver Burkeman writing about Kristnamurti in the Guardian, 10 August 2013]
Things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements.
[Marcus Aurelius]