Welcome to this month’s collection of quotes recently encountered. So in no particular order …
All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.
[John Trudell]
Tell me your favourite weird fact … The Earth is covered in corpses. We breathe the air the dead exude, eat the food they nourished with their decay, pour their remains into our cars, wear them and sleep on them. And then we call them scary without even noticing that they are present in every single thing of our lives. We live because of the dead.
[unknown]
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
[Jacob Bronowski]
Once you’ve understood, that you can’t understand everything you start to be wise.
[unknown]
A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not.
[Bertrand Russell; British philosopher and logician (1872–1970)]
There seems to be a complete difference of style between the things that human beings do and the things that nature does, even though human beings are themselves part of nature. On the one hand, nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles. And for some reason or other, we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of. And, you know, we say to people, “Well, let’s get things straightened out”, “Let’s get it ironed out”, “Let’s get it all squared away”. And then, somehow, we think we understand things when we have translated into terms of straight lines and squares. Maybe that’s why they call rather rigid people squares. But it doesn’t fit nature.
The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And only when human beings get to working on things – they build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that the world isn’t really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.
[Alan Watts]
Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.
[Epicurus]
When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren’t scary, they’re actually predictable, they won’t explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that’s not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don’t click. Buttons don’t even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can’t move or remove them – a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you’re not looking, hide menus, bury options, don’t respect or don’t remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction – feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization – all that fundamental Don Norman shit – have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there’s nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It’s a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
[AlexC; @neuralex@neurodifferent.me]
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
[CG Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (1875–1961)]
It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.
[Samuel Pepys; Diary; 21 January 1660/61]
While the best of our physical theories are really excellent – wonderfully predictive – not one of them is complete. When applied in the wrong situation, they fail. That’s just the way it is. So it’s pretty clear, I think, that physics has no guarantee of arriving at a final theory.
Instead, my bet is it’s going to be successive approximations to reality all the way down. You’ll do better and better, but you’ll never get there. Because to get there, in my world view, you have to have experimental checks of predictions, and experiments are finite: they cannot explore all eventualities to all accuracy. So my conclusion is that we’ll never get there.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 27 January 2024]
Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
[John Adams (1735–1826), American statesman and Founding Father]
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
[Nicolo Machiavelli, c.1505]
The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interest taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far distant from the egoist’s own affairs.
[Anthony Powell, A Buyer´s Market (1952)]
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
[Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility]
Earth, water, fire and air
Met together in a garden fair,
Put in a basket bound with skin.
If you answer this riddle,
If you answer this riddle,
You’ll never begin.
[Robin Williamson (Incredible String Band); “Koeeoaddi There” from album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968)]