So, a day late, here is this month’s collection of quotes interesting and amusing.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
[Jorge Louis Borges]
I’m skeptical of any claims to a special, singular women’s spirituality (just as I’m skeptical of a singular “women’s” anything – including bathrooms).
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]
The Ten Commandments are a warning from an all-powerful, all-knowing God, eternally separate from ourselves, not to do certain things or else He’ll kick our asses. The Buddhist precepts are reminders to trust our own intuitive sense of right and wrong.
[Brad Warner]
Making ethical choices based on external systems of value (societal norms, religious doctrine) seems to me like an insufficient way of going about things because it means I would be using someone else’s definition of reality and someone else’s experience instead of understanding for myself what is good and useful.
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]
The only power the [Buddhist] precepts have, the only power any of this practice has, is the power we give it, the meaning we make of it. This is why I have such a high tolerance for teachers, ceremonies, and ritual; they’re inherently devoid of meaning until I create my own, through and with those external points of reference.
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]
“Berks and wankers”
Not every reader will immediately understand these two terms as I use them, but most people, most users of English, habitually distinguish between two types of person whose linguistic habits they deplore if not abhor. For my present purpose these habits exclude the way people say their vowel sounds, not because these are unimportant but because they are hard to notate and at least as hard to write about.
Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.
Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.
In cold fact, most speakers, like most writers left to themselves, try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious, however they might describe the extremes they try to avoid, and this is healthy for them and the language.
[Kingsley Amis; The King’s English (Penguin Modern Classics)]
Being hyper-aware of problems I can do nothing to solve never brought me any joy, nor did it ever make the slightest difference in those problems.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/hitler-sells-but-im-not-buying/5926
Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s OK to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
[Ian McEwan; The Cement Garden]
On Friday at Chequers the government will do what it has been doing for the past two years: spend an inordinate amount of time negotiating with itself before producing a ‘solution’ that is unworkable, only to take it to Brussels and discover it is also unacceptable. The problem is not just that they don’t have a rabbit; they don’t even have a hat.
[Gary Younge; Guardian; 6 July 2018]
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral,
The laurel, mead of mighty conquerors
And poets sage, the fir that weepest still,
They yew obedient to the bender’s will,
The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill,
The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill,
The fruitful olive, and the platane round,
The carver holm, the maple seldom sound.
[Edmund Spencer; The Faerie Queene]
The overriding sadness … is that the nation lacks the political leadership required to tackle the 2016 referendum outcome informed as it was by lies, misinformation and the antics of bodies such as Vote Leave … Surely, there is no need to follow a referendum result given that it is now clear that it will lead to ruin.
[Law and Lawyers blog; http://obiterj.blogspot.com/2018/07/uk-eu-future-relationship-uk-proposals_14.html]
An ancient Greek walks into his tailor’s shop with a pair of torn pants.
“Euripides?” says the tailor.
“Yeah, Eumenides?” replies the man.
[Origin unknown]
More next month!