Here’s another selection of interesting, thought-provoking and amusing quotes encountered in the last few weeks.
Nothing is stronger or better than this, that a man and his wife live together, sharing one heart and one mind, a great grief to their enemies and a joy to their friends; but best of all they know it themselves.
[Homer, The Odyssey]
When a German dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.
[Mark Twain]
If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.
[Cicero]
To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
[Mark Twain]
The strategy relied on forlorn hopes that the “confidence fairy” would lift Greece out of this policy-induced nose-dive.
[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in a Daily Telegraph article, 29 July 2016, on how the IMF has screwed up Greece; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/28/imf-admits-disastrous-love-affair-with-euro-apologises-for-the-i/]
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
[Douglas Adams]
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
[Oscar Wilde; Lady Windermere’s Fan]
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
[Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching]
Usually when people predict an end to religion, what they’re hoping will take its place is a world of pure scientific rationality based on a strictly materialistic view of the universe. I think Richard Dawkins and his followers would like to see that.
The problem with that is, pure materialism has failed us just as badly as pure spirituality. The pure spirituality of the Middle Ages provided a lot of uplifting fantasies, but left most people living in filth and squalor. The pure materialism that took hold in the 19th century, and continues to dominate us today, provided flush toilets, the Internet and a generally higher standard of living. But it left people feeling empty inside while runaway technology and the waste it produces threatens us with extinction.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/the-age-of-reality/4716]
As soon as dogs realise we have bones hidden under our skin all hell is going to break loose.
[unknown]
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
[Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard]