This month’s collection of quotes interesting, thought-provoking and amusing.
To escape from the world means that one’s mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.
[Dogen]
It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.
[Terry Pratchett]
One does try not to be an Old Git, but they don’t make it easy.
[Alan Bennett]
We are all expected to do unethical things as a matter of course. Resistance isn’t just shouting; it requires quiet, time-consuming adamance.
[Prof. Constantine Sandis]
It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
The internet has filled the world with nonsense news stories designed to confirm people’s existing prejudices and led every hate-filled dimwit conspiracy theorist to feel as if they are part of a movement rather just a lonely troll in a basement.
[Ian Dunt at http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/articles/the-new-authoritarianism/]
Note to self: No matter what, no matter how hard or painful or awkward or scary the situation, all you can really do is show up as yourself. So be the SELFIEST SELF you can be. The most you. The truest you. You will figure it out, you magnificent mess, you.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
[George Orwell, 1984]
A hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock.
[Graffiti at Pompeii, ca. AD 79]
If we pluck and trim our doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in.
[Aristophanes (446-386BC), on the subject of pubic hair]
Tobacco kills 52,000 people a year from lung cancer, and there’s no telling how many lives have been ruined through drinking. But to my knowledge, no one has ever died of a blow job.
[Florynce Kennedy, 1916-2000]
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
[Robert A Heinlein]
At 16, my dress sense was in the first full flower of its baroque glory … Bad taste is a destiny. It took me about 50 years to learn that I should dress as plainly as possible, and even then I had a tendency towards lime-green shirts.
[Clive James]
We live in a time in which the very nature of reality seems to be crumbling. But reality is fine. Reality won’t change according to how we choose to describe it. It’s just that our way of engaging with it may be shifting radically … I think this crazy-pants stuff that’s going on right now points to something even weirder … We no longer have any faith at all in the political system. Or in religion. Or in much of anything. Maybe there is a huge mass of people out there who don’t believe it even matters who gets elected president. And maybe, at the root of it, this is because we don’t know if we, ourselves, are as real as we thought we were.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/multiple-worlds-fake-news-rick-and-morty-trump-and-reality/5062]
The mind is so wonderstruck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience … Often, the pleasure of the experience is confused with the experience and the insight lost in the ecstasy, so that in trying to retain the secondary effects of the experience the individual misses its point — that the immediate now is complete even when it is not ecstatic.
[Alan Watts]
Evolution is not “survival of the fittest” but “survival of the good enough”.
[Dr Bethany Brookshire]
He who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
[John Stuart Mill]
Does anyone else have the occasional memory spring randomly into their mind about something heard or learnt in childhood but had long forgotten? Of course it usually happens when you’re in the shower or just dropping off to sleep, so you forget about it again even though you would like to investigate it.
Well that happened to me the other night, yes, as I was dropping off to sleep. Luckily I wasn’t so asleep I couldn’t scribble a reminder. (I always have a pad of Post-Its and a pencil by the bed.)
And what was this? Something I got from my mother as a child: dialect numbers and counting used by shepherds in various areas of the UK. I learnt one from my mother, but there are many and they’re all slightly different.
Imagine you’re counting sheep on a hillside. The one I learnt goes like this:
1 Yan 2 Tyan 3 Tethera 4 Methera 5 Pimp 6 Sethera 7 Lethera 8 Hovera 9 Dovera 10 Dick 11 Yan-a-dick 12 Tyan-a-dick 13 Tethera-dick 14 Methera-dick 15 Bumfit 16 Yan-a-bumfit 17 Tyan-a-bumfit 18 Tethera-bumfit 19 Methera-bumfit 20 Giggot
You can just see the old shepherd, who can just count to ten on his fingers, using this to count his flock.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Wikipedia lists a couple of dozen such sheep counting schemes from around the UK. Apparently this one comes from Borrowdale. That would fit as my mother certainly spend time hostelling in the Lakes before the war.
At least it is logical — well as logical as the way the French count above sixty, where for instance 63 is soixante-treize, and 92 is quatre-vingt douze.
Isn’t it just brilliant?!