Another mid-monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing …
The pain of being alone motivates us to seek the safety of companionship, which in turn benefits the species by encouraging group cooperation and protection. Loneliness persists because it provides an essential evolutionary benefit for social animals. Like thirst, hunger or pain, loneliness is an aversive state that animals seek to resolve, improving their long-term survival.
[Emily Singer; Quanta Magazine]
You can’t let one setback ruin your life. You’ve got to just keep being a squirrel.
[Mikel Delgado quoted at ]
Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate’. Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need’. It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
[From A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living]
It may be remarked with equal truth that ignorance is often the effect of wonder. It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of enquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate enquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive, they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing, and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties.
[Samuel Johnson]
To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
[Lao Tzu]
With all this opportunity, this comedy and tragedy, how near all men come to doing nothing!
[Henry David Thoreau; Journal; 29 May 1857]
We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
The difference between lying and bullshit is less a question of a statement’s relation to the truth than of the motivation of the person making it. A liar wants his audience to believe what he says; a bullshitter doesn’t care, as long as he gets what he wants.
[Harry Frankfurt]
The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity. For this reason, he has integrity.
[Lao Tzu]
When you are in your middle seventies you have passed your prime as a cat-catcher.
[PG Wodehouse]