Where is this year going to? Yet again we’ve got to my monthly collection of quotes at record speed.

When fish swim in water, though they keep swimming, there is no end to the Water. When birds fly in the sky, though they keep flying, there is no end to the sky. At the same time, fish and birds have never left the water or the sky … If a bird leaves the sky it will die at once, and if a fish leaves the water it will die at once. So we can understand that the water is life and that the sky is life. Birds are life and fish are life. It may be that life is birds and life is fish. And beyond this there may still be further progress. The existence of practice and experience, the existence of a lifetime and a life, are like this.
[Eihei Dogen (c.1200-1253), Genjo Koan]

Never fear that: if he be so resolved,
I can o’ersway him; for he loves to hear
That unicorns may be betray’d with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils and men with flatterers;
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work;
For I can give his humour the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.
[Shakespeare; Julius Caesar; Act 2, Scene 1]

Thirty years ago, this would have been totally nuts to propose. It’s still kind of nuts, but it’s like borderline insanity.
[Daniel Carney, quoted at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/windchime-experiment-dark-matter-wind-gravity-physics]

It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent – lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.
[Tove Jansson]

The fact is all the finest white wine in the world is made in the Côte de Beaune and all of it is made from Chardonnay. Accordingly, anyone who likes white wine and says they do not like Chardonnay is, I’m afraid, an idiot.
[Charlie Boston; Understanding European Wines]

Retsina is considered to be the traditional wine of Greece. It has its origins in ancient times when the pots in which the wine was matured (“amphoras”) were sealed with pine resin. Nowadays, resin from the Aleppo pine is added to the must during fermentation to produce the distinctive resinated style. It is very much an acquired taste which, in my opinion, is not worth acquiring.
[Charlie Boston; Understanding European Wines]

Wine makes daily life easy, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.
[Benjamin Franklin]

In victory, you deserve Champagne. In defeat you need it.
[Napoleon Bonaparte]

He who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long.
[Martin Luther]

There will be no more talk of antiseptics, unless and until tinned Herrings begin to frolic in their brine.
[Jean-Henri Fabre, More Hunting Wasps, 1915]

In the first UK coronavirus lockdown … one of the first commodities to be panic-bought from the supermarket shelves was toilet roll. Nobody really knows why toilet roll was so coveted. I for one could live without toilet roll, but not without pasta and wine.
[Seirian Sumner; Endless Forms, The Secret World of Wasps; she’s spent many years doing research in the jungles]

I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place, in which our species … has absolutely no significance … I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty & meaning and to share it while we can.
[Katie Mack, @AstroKatie; Disorientation at https://sciences.ncsu.edu/news/disorientation-a-science-poem-by-katie-mack/]

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road.
[Anne Sexton]

Here’s this month’s collection of quotes encountered.

It’s almost impossible to believe he [Boris] exists in politics. It’s as if we took everything that was ever bad about the UK, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it in an old sausage skin and then taught it to make noises with its face.
[Jim Whitehouse on Twitter]

What is offensive about a penis, a vulva or breasts? Nothing as such. I would argue, it’s like a knife. It’s not offensive until you point it at someone.
[Marc at https://www.nudeandhappy.com/2022/06/13/i-love-being-naked-and-no-its-not-sexual/]

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.
[Cary Grant]

The only thing which has improved since Brexit is the average IQ of EU citizens.
[Kenneth Clarke]

We are a society of altruists, governed by psychopaths.
[George Monbiot]

There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
[Yosemite National Park Forest Ranger]

I see
  and I hear
    and I speak no evil;
I carry
  no malice
    within my breast;
yet quite without
  wishing
    a man to the Devil
one may be
  permitted
    to hope for the best.
[Piet Hein, An Ethical Grook]

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
[Seneca]

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject … And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them … Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
[Seneca]

Acting ethically is how we, the musicians contributing to this performance called the universe, avoid hitting bum notes and screwing up the performance. Acting unethically is how We make the symphony of life into something ugly, confused, and cacophonous rather than something beautiful and deeply moving.
[Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing]

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
[Blaise Pascal]

St Augustine [in his] pages about the nature of time in his book “The Confessions” says, “When I listen to music I get a meaning from a musical phrase, but I never listen to the phrase. I listen to one note at a time.” If I listen to one note, how do I know about the previous notes? Well, of course I know because I remember them, but if I remember them … the meaning comes from the notes playing now and the memories of the previous ones. So it’s all in the present and it can only be the present together because there is memory. But it’s more than that because since the brain is designed by evolution to use memory to anticipate for
a purpose, because it is designed to try to get somewhere. That’s how living evolution designed our behaviour.
[Carlo Roovelli, Lecture “The Physics and the Philosophy of Time”]

Our usual collection of quotes encountered.

Conspiracy is the default explanation of a mystery when you’re looking for meaning. Uncertainty is the default when you’re looking for truth.

[A molecule called Celastrol] does all kinds of stuff in cell assays and animal models … and you can basically find papers that will illustrate it doing anything you feel like seeing – antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antidiabetic, antioxidant, insecticide, you name it. It’s probably a decent floor polish, although I’m not sure I’d recommend its use as a dessert topping.
[Derek Lowe; https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fun-protein-degradation]

I don’t think that AI is going to provide answers … any time soon – largely because the difficulty is lack of knowledge in the first place. You can’t expect the software to take a bunch of used pizza boxes and find a route to convert them into gold jewellery, and unfortunately a lot of our knowledge (when you look at it on the absolute scale) is at the used pizza box stage.
[Derek Lowe; https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-patent-system]

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
[Antonio Gramsci]

Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, “Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Linsey Lohan. Why is that?”
[John Green]

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor.
[Oscar Wilde]

When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
[Epicurus, died 270BC]

You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck. After years of living your life in survival mode you are exhausted. There is a difference.
[Nakeia Homer]

The Brexit agreement was written in English so they could understand it.
[Ursula von de Leyen, EU President]

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
[Bertrand Russell]

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
[TS Elliot]

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
[Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald]

The human body is the best work of art.
[Jess C Scott]

This month’s selection of quotes encountered.

In every way, the notion of women’s unsuitability didn’t just happen. It was systematically and consciously created. And, of course, another way of keeping women in their place is to insist that their minds just don’t allow them to inhabit traditional male bastions.
[Prof. Stephen Reicher]

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[George Orwell]

The most amazing thing about the human mind is that you literally never have to stop putting things into it; you can always learn more if you want to, and there is always more to learn.
[Katie Mack]

[T]here are parts of your own body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of Mars. Most researchers I talked to blamed this dearth of knowledge on the black-box problem: the female body is considered more complex, more obscure, with much of its plumbing tucked up inside. To get inside it, we’ve needed high-tech imaging tools, tools that have only come around in recent decades. When I heard these answers, I couldn’t help thinking of what science has done in the twenty-first century: put a rover on Mars, made a three-parent baby, built an artificial sheep uterus. And we couldn’t figure out the composition of vaginal mucus?
[Rachel Gross; Vagina Obscura]

For centuries, science has been treating women as walking wombs, baby machines and incubators of new life. This narrow perspective has prevented us from asking questions and making advancements that could help all of us live longer, healthier lives. It’s time for a paradigm shift. We need to finally see the female body for what it truly is: a powerful constellation of interlocking elements, each part indivisible from the whole, that work together to support our health from cradle to grave. As we fill in the missing parts of this picture, we will undoubtedly expand our understanding of all bodies.
[Rachel Gross; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/09/the-big-idea-why-we-need-to-rewrite-the-history-of-female-bodies]

We have the most profound and bizarre psychological block against providing assistance to people in need in cash. We insist against all evidence that they will mostly waste it. In fact cash is the single most practical, efficient and effective intervention for improving lives.
[Rory Stewart]

Listen carefully to everything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big.
[Catherine M Wallace]

Life. One long panic punctuated by cups of tea.

The goddess [Kali] symbolises, we are told, evil being cut away, hypocrisy undone, abusive powers crushed. I rather hoped the necklace of severed male heads she wears might be portraits of well-known oppressors, but no, they mostly look like Salvador Dalí.
[Marina Warner; https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/may/16/goddesses-marina-warner-volcanic-power-of-witches-she-devils-divinities-british-museum]