Here’s this months collection of recently encountered, miscellaneous quotes.
Facts alone are wanted in life. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else … nothing else will ever be of service to them.
[Charles Dickens, Hard Times]
The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
[William Blake]
What is now proved was once only imagined.
[William Blake]
I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
[William Blake]
Combining reason with empathy is a powerful force for good – it is both logical and morally right to see all humans as equal, regardless of sex, gender, race, religion or worldview.
[Prof. Alice Roberts]
the morning after i ‘lost my virginity’
i stared into the bathroom mirror, searching for the change
i counted all my freckles, everyone of them in place
i counted every hair, every eyelash, every brow
five knuckles on each hand still, thirty-one teeth in my mouth
I pulled apart my flesh, counted seven layers deep
for a minute, held my heart, counted eighty solid beats
lips still as red as blood, I spat into the sink
walked into the world again
i hadn’t lost a thing
[Holly McNish]
A fool who knows he is a fool has a little intelligence, but a fool that thinks he is intelligent is really a fool. [Sanskrit Proverb]
A fool is like all other men as long as he remains silent.
[Danish Proverb]
Don’t approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.
[Jewish Proverb]
The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.
[Mark Twain]
The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it.
[Doris Day]
This is the garden
of being and not being,
of rocks and no rocks.
Here, when you enter and are,
is and is not are equal.
[a Zen waka]
This is a common problem for smart people, especially ones who are highly verbal. They use words as a smoke screen, and it’s all the more effective when their words are true. Less articulate people tend to vent through physicality. They yell, punch, kick, run, scream, sob, dance, jump for joy … I explain. And when I’m done explaining, everything I’ve explained is still stuck inside me, only now it has a label on it.
[Marcus Gedult at https://www.quora.com/When-does-intelligence-become-a-curse/answer/Marcus-Geduld]
Lady Mary was continually exasperated by the exploits of her son Edward, a chap so dissolute and useless that he eventually had no option but to become an MP.
[Caroline Rance at https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/the-pioneering-life-of-mary-wortley-montagu/]
My good lords, I must bring to your attention a grave issue that requires our utmost concern. You see, my fellow land-owning gentry, it seems that the invention of mechanized industry, the rise of “capitalism”, and the impact of the recent plague have brought upon us a wave of moral degradation and irredeemable sloth – specifically, nobody wants to be a serf anymore …
Not only do our current serfs refuse to labor, but the serfs we ejected from our fiefdoms when we feared the plague would harm our profits now don’t want to come back and replace the workers we kept who then subsequently died of the plague. Did they not know that we banished them with the expectation they’d come crawling back at our earliest convenience? What has the world come to when the whims of noblemen no longer control the lives of the masses?
[Andrew Singleton at https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/nobody-wants-to-be-a-serf-anymore]