Welcome to this month’s selection of quotes, recently encountered and which amused or interested me.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
[Leonard Cohen]
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
[Viktor Frankl]
When you get up in the morning, stretch your limbs, so that the natural heat is stimulated. Then comb your hair because this removes dirt and comforts the brain. Wash your face with cold water to give your skin a good colour and to stimulate the natural heat. Clear your nose and your chest by coughing, and clean your teeth and gums with the bark of some scented tree.
[Taddeo Alderotti, On the Preservation of Health, 13th century]
We are not meant to be ruled by our Prime Minister, we are meant to be governed.
[From Going Medieval blog]
The topic of compassion is not at all religious business; it is important to know that it is human business.
[Dalai Lama]
Even if the whole world is nothing but a bunch of jerks all doing jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.
[Eihei Dogen, 13th-century Japanese Soto Zen Master]
The risk for young people is minimal and very high for old people. Every seven or eight years, your risk of dying if infected doubles … statistician David Spiegelhalter explained all this clearly on The Andrew Marr Show, saying that we need to be proportionate about the risk we face. He called the [UK government] press briefings “number theatre” – underlining the need to communicate data properly and treating people with respect.
This is the opposite of what the government has done, and people are right to feel angry. Johnson, the great risk-taker, has diced with death himself. His administration is still delaying practices such as quarantining new arrivals to the UK. He is risking the union, with other parts of the UK in open derision of his sloganeering.
If we are to be run by a second-rate ad agency, with graphics from the 80s, it is no wonder we feel vulnerable. We may, therefore, take matters into our own hands. The lockdown will break from the bottom up as people need an income. The middle classes need their gardeners, cleaners, dog-walkers and nannies. Roots need doing.
[Suzanne Moore; Guardian; 11/05/2020]
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
[Julius Caesar]
All that is required to deal with this crisis is ‘common sense’, or ‘British determination’, or any other phrase that uses inverted commas as protection from critical scrutiny. Weak leaders, of all political persuasions and managerial levels, like phrases like this because they allow them to appear to offer a solution whilst failing actually to do so.
[John Bull at London Reconnections]
Women could practice pubic depilation (“we pluck and trim our doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in”, Aristophanes …). One way was to singe the hair with an oil lamp … Not all women did this … however, nor did all men like it (cf. Lucilius, in bulgam penetrare pilosam, “to penetrate a hairy bag” …): “a hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock” (futuitur cunnus pilossus multo melliur quam glaber; eadem continet vaporem et eadem vellit mentulam, Pompeii graffito …). A young female specialist, picatrix, arranged pubic hair.
[John G Younger; Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z]
Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, “Listen mate, life has surface noise”.
[John Peel]
More next month …