This month’s selection of quotes which caught my attention …
No one ever commanded a cat. You can shout at a cat, and it may vanish through the window, or ignore you and begin washing its tail, or stare at you in pained surprise. But it will never apologise, never promise not to do it again.
[CR Milne]
Three articles of Civil Service: it takes longer to do things quickly; it is more expensive to do them cheaply; it is more democratic to do them in secret.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1384965488317435911]
[T]oxic masculinity is stopping the servant day labourers of a dying empire from picking out the right avocados for me.
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387525646658777093]
… the normalisation in big cities of getting a grocery servant to pick out whatever you want to cook for lunch that day …
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387476900499570691]
Freckles, moles, scars, cellulite, scabs, pimples, textures, broken capillaries, stretch marks, loose skin, pigmentation, redness, dark circles, birth marks, hair … all belong as a part of the experience of skin. Our skin is alive, dynamic, changing, fascinating and weird. Our surfaces are unique works of art just as they are.
[Ashlee Bennett]
My goal is not just to feel comfortable in my skin. My goal is to feel *so* comfortable in my skin that the patriarchy gets confused, can’t compute, malfunctions, and spontaneously combusts.
[@EmilyDFitness]
Date someone you can be weird as hell with who at the end of the day still wants to get naked with you.
[unknown]
[There’s been] this separation of humanity from nature, mind from body, spirit from intellect, and that we had moved away from this more holistic, spiritual way of seeing the world. Lovelock’s idea of the biosphere as a self-regulating system was antithetical to the view that we could dissect the world and understand all the parts in a deterministic way.
[Suzanne Simard; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033320-900-suzanne-simard-interview-how-i-uncovered-the-hidden-language-of-trees/]
Everything had to always be as it is, Parmenides reasoned, because nothing could come to be out of nothing – nonexistence could not produce existence, because there is no such thing as nonexistence, by definition of existence. Reality consisted in an ever-present, unchanging, unmovable mass of undifferentiated sameness that filled all of space.
[Tom Siegfried; https://www.sciencenews.org/article/anaxagoras-science-athens-history-philosophy]
The one who plants trees, knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
[Rabindranath Tagore]
None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.
[Anthony Hopkins]
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
[Often wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but who first said it?]
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
[Edward Teller; Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics]
Humans are not optimized for intelligence. Rather, we are the first and possibly dumbest species capable of producing a technological civilization.
[Eliezer Yudkowsky]
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
[unknown]
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.
[unknown]
Being naked starts with your spirit. If you are not allowing yourself to be naked spiritually, being naked physically is significant.
[Stephanie McManus]
Sex is more than an act of pleasure, it’s the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.
[pleasure_portraits; https://www.instagram.com/p/COyilOuBpDD/?igshid=xbn7yul1eb9z; NSFW]