Category Archives: quotes

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Our monthly collection of quotes …

Boris Johnson is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next. Twenty years have passed since the Conservative party first selected him as a candidate. Michael Howard and David Cameron made him a shadow minister, and Theresa May gave him the Foreign Office. Thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone.
[Rory Stewart; Financial Times; 21/01/2022]

[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous … Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.
[Parmenides]

At the same time he managed to retain in a reasonably flourishing state … what General Conyers would have called his ‘personal myth’ … The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]

People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer … can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer … is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.
[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]

Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I’d long decided there were no answers. I’m beginning to suspect there aren’t really any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]

Think about it … Every single corpse on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person. Stay lazy my friends.
[unknown]

I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!
[Not William Shakespeare; attributions to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill are also unsupported. See, inter alia, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/24/wit-battle/]

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candour and patience, to study both sides of the question …
[Bishop George Horne (1730-1792)]

The [Covid] vaccines, I am informed by passionate people with degrees from Twitter State University, are making the coronavirus strains worse, turning vaccinated people into destructive super-spreaders, making them far more likely to die from the next variant, giving them ADE, making them sterile, giving them heart attacks, giving them cancer, destroying their immune systems, giving them HIV outright, rearranging their DNA, rearranging it so that their DNA is now covered under evil Pharma patents and they are now thus owned by drug companies, rearranging it so that they are now technically another species entirely, targeting this particular ethnic group over here, deliberately sparing this particular ethnic group over there, filling everyone’s bodies full of tracking devices, filling them full of alien nanotech micro-bots, filling them full of 5G antennas, filling them full of aborted foetal cells, filling them full of Satanic messages and portraits of Bill Gates and trial memberships for Amazon Prime and God knows what else.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]

Life’s too short. It was too short even before I got vaccinated and thus apparently turned myself into a reptilian middle-management demon from Zeta Ridiculoon. That’s me, all right: 50% RNA by body weight, and the rest is brimstone and shredded takeout menus.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

The first of this year’s monthly round-up of quotes amusing and/or thought-provoking.

When you meet one little being, it might be a mosquito, or pine tree, or rock, to become Buddha with each of them is your practice. Do you understand? You become Buddha with each of them … This is communicating with a being that appeared for you, to make sure you are enlightened! It is also enlightened. This is how everything is actually happening. Sometimes neither one knows what is going on. Sometimes both completely know what is going on.
[Kobun Chino Roshi]

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful for her ability
to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.
[F Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby]

youth
today i am the youngest
i will ever be again

younger than each lick of sea
each lash of wave on beach
each pebble skimming stream
each kiss of falling rain

today i am the youngest
i will ever be again

tomorrow
and the next day

– the same

[Hollie McNish]

When you’re a kid you don’t realise you’re also watching your parents grow up.
[source unknown]

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
[Terry Pratchett]

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
[Terry Pratchett]

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
[AJ Liebling]

quotes

Quotes Monthly

So here we go with the last of this year’s round ups of recently encountered quotes.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
[Noam Chomsky]

According to Frog, dogs must sit on logs and armadillos on pillows; and, while cats could once relax on mats, a recent rule change dictates they must now repose on gnats.
[Blurb for Kes Grey’s Oi Cat!]

The winter solstice time is no longer celebrated as it once was, with the understanding that this is a period of descent and rest, of going within our homes, within ourselves and taking in all that we have been through, all that has passed in this full year which is coming to a close … like nature and the animal kingdom around us, this time of hibernation is so necessary for our tired limbs, our burdened minds.
[Dee Laliberte, on Facebook]

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
[Charles Bukowski]

In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another.
[Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies]

All fungi are edible, some fungi are only edible once.

Cultivating compassion is not a religious practice focused on ensuring we go to heaven or a good future life. It’s about living a good day-to-day life here and now. It’s about being a happy person. Warm-heartedness is a fundamental good human quality.
[Dalai Lama]

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.
[Haruki Murakami]

What is most serious for the health of our democracy is that [Boris Johnson’s] lies aren’t just made to the media but to Parliament, making it impossible for MPs to do their job of holding the Government to account. The Prime Minister is driving a coach and horses through the Ministerial Code with impunity because the person ultimately responsible for upholding the Ministerial Code is … the Prime Minister.
[Caroline Lucas MP, Metro, 15 December 2021; online at https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/15/boris-johnson-10-reasons-why-the-prime-minister-needs-to-resign-15777201/]

Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it: but the instruction of fools is folly.
[Proverbs 16:22]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

And it’s that time of the month again already for our selection of quotes interested or amused me. Here goes …

Nobody ever knows what to do. There’s a kind of an illusion that some people know what to do at every moment and there are people who are extremely confident and act like they know what to do but they don’t know what to do any better then you do. So not knowing what to do is sometimes a perfectly fine situation. I don’t know what to do so I’m just going to do something. And if your action is sincere and not motivated by some kind of greed or anger or some other negative quality or emotion then what you do will be right. It may not be perfect. It’ll never be perfect. It can’t be perfect. But it won’t be the wrong thing to do. You just do something that’s not motivated by greed or anger or ego, for want of a better word.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/the-beer-oclock-interview-2005/7805]

I always felt that what Buddhism showed me was how stupid I was and by extension how stupid everybody was. And all I’m trying to say in my books is, “Look, we’re all stupid, so just live with it. Just deal with it.” … once you realize that you are stupid you have total freedom because the other aspect of your stupidity is that you’re … also the sum total of the universe. You’re also the centre of the universe and the centre of the universe is stupidity itself. And to understand this is to be completely free from ever having to try to live up to some kind of fantasy you’ve created for yourself, and just be where you are.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/the-beer-oclock-interview-2005/7805]

Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy and application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.
[Abraham Flexner]

In any case, we overslept. When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice. Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-west breeze, statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable! And they changed colour whenever they felt like it – ice blue, green and, in the evenings, orange. Early in the morning they could be pink. It started to blow and the floes piled into each other, rearing up, thrusting down (as if having an orgy, as Brunström might have put it).
[Tove Jansson; Notes from an Island]

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.
[Terry Pratchett, Good Omens]

We ring the Quick to Church, the dead to Grave,
Good is our use, such usage let us have.
Who here therefore doth Damn, or Curse or Swear,
Or strike in Quarrel tho no Blood appear.

Who wears a Hat or Spur or turns a Bell
Or by unskilful handing ruins a Pail,
Shall Sixpense pay for every single Crime
‘Twill make him careful ‘gainst another time.

Let all in Love and Friendship hither come,
Whilst the shrill Treble calls to Thundering Tom,
And since bells are our modest Recreation,
Let’s Rise and Ring and Fall to Admiration.

[Ringers’ Rhyme Board at St Kew, Cornwall]

I have always been used to nudity since I was born. The non-judgment of the body of the other and the absence of social difference due to the clothes. Collective nudity is beautiful and not sexual. I like collective nudity of all genders and ages so that everyone is on the same level. Nudity does not mean sexuality. I admire the beauty of the female body … I find it beautiful and admirable.
[Pleasure Portraits on Instagram]

Graham Roper shares a 2001 article from Electronics Times, about a new British oscilloscope, “the first instrument of its kind to be calibrated directly in practical units of measure”. With a screen area of 3¹⁄₈ micro-acres, power consumption of 2052 British thermal units per hour and a maximum deflection of 21¹⁄₁₁ milli-fathoms, its timebase had 24 calibrated sweep rates from 4¹⁄₈ micro-fortnights/furlong to 208¹⁄₄ fortnights/furlong. We aren’t sure, but the 1 April dateline may indicate humorous intent.
[Feedback; New Scientist; 30/10/2021]

A first step was the introduction of two beavers last summer – Sigourney Beaver and Jean Claude Van-Dam (who now have two kits, Beavie Wonder and Beavie Nicks)
[Jane Dunford; Guardian; 16 November 2021]

[C]ircadian rhythm and cellular timekeeping … [come] down to cycles of protein synthesis and degradation, spooling and unspooling with … the ribosomes and the proteasomes as the ultimate timekeepers. It’s as if we have little medieval water clocks constantly running inside us.
[Derek Lowe at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/proteins-aging-not-so-gracefully]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here’s this month’s bumber collection of quotes …

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
[Isaac Asimov]

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
[Samuel Johnson, 1775]

Words … I know exactly what words I’m wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.
[Roald Dahl]

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it … or because is it traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But, whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings–that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
[Buddha]

I think we all do have a guardian angel. I believe they work through us all the time, when we are thoughtful and good and kind to each other.
[Roma Downey]

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.
[Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957]

Hendrix is like Beethoven, Vivaldi is more Des O’Connor
[Nigel Kennedy]

The National Gallery’s autumn exhibition, Poussin and the Dance, opens next week. The central work in the show, the maypole if you like, is Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time (c.1634), which has been lent by the Wallace Collection. You know the one. The beautiful, wistful painting that opens Anthony Powell’s great novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time … This isn’t a daring show, this isn’t a ground-breaking show, but it is a show to make you wistful. Poussin’s pictures are celebrations of youth and music, wine and sun and the sheer pleasure of sandals kicked off before dancing till dawn.
[Laura Freeman writing about the National Gallery’s Poussin exhibition (Poussin and the Dance, 9 October to 2 January 2022; Times; 01/10/2021)]

You spend your whole career telling people not to blame the positions of the planets for problems in their personal lives and then you almost get hit by a car because Jupiter and Saturn are so pretty tonight.
[Katie Mack on Twitter]

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is a total masterpiece. I will never get over it. I don’t think there is a better written work that is also wrong about everything.
[Joseph Rezek on Twitter]

What the pandemic’s shown, particularly if you’ve got children, is you don’t want to be living in a flat doing home schooling. What people need – what families need – are homes with gardens. They need big rooms.
[Jackie Sadek, Expert in Urban Regeneration]

I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
[Marie Corelli, Novelist (1855-1924)]

The expression “call a spade a spade” comes from the work of Plutarch, who originally wrote “call a fig a fig”. Fig was crude slang for the vulva, so “call a c**t a c**t” is closer.
[Whores of Yore on Twitter]

[Biodiversity] is the engine that produces everything that we consume. You can think of it like a wild supermarket that provides us with food and other gifts without us doing anything. The fact that we have several different varieties of apples, tomatoes and other foods is down to biodiversity – and when it is diminished we lose out.
[Professor Andy Purvis, Natural History Museum]

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.
[Marcel Proust]

Once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
[Rilke]

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls …
[Gerard Manley Hopkins]

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day and allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]

The last thing the African continent needs is a failed British politician. This isn’t the 19th Century.
[Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now, 16/10/2021]

There are very few things good about being an adult, but fancying chips for breakfast and so having chips for breakfast is certainly one.
[@NickMotown on Twitter]

Always remember that the most important thing is to live life in the present moment, and that happiness is not a by-product of external factors, but the result of positively conditioning your mind. Happiness is at the grasp of everyone.
[Khedrupchen Rinpoche]