This month’s selection of interesting, amusing and thought-provoking quotes encountered …

There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.
[Walt Whitman]

We had an opportunity to be the most influential country in Europe, but our very marginal decision to leave the EU, based on a combination of simple ignorance and some sort of myopic xenophobia, has weakened both this country and the whole of western Europe. Even so, Europe remains the most culturally interesting continent and the one where the finest wines in the world continue to be made …
[Charlie Boston; Understanding European Wines]

Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies. It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.
[https://knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2022/fun-facts-about-bones-more-just-scaffolding]

London Zoo at half-term is a cheerful cacophony with blue macaws out-screaming six-year-olds.
[Emma Beddington; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/06/the-zoologist-sticking-her-neck-out-in-the-battle-of-the-sexes]

The majority of spiders are sexual cannibals … the big spiders in the middle of webs [are] always female; males are basically wandering useless sacks of sperm.
[Lucy Cooke; quoted by Emma Beddington at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/06/the-zoologist-sticking-her-neck-out-in-the-battle-of-the-sexes]

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away … The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.
[Terry Pratchett]

Always keep a bottle of Champagne in the fridge for special occasions. Sometimes the special occasion is that you’ve got a bottle of Champagne in the fridge.
[Hester Browne]

When the rich rob the poor it’s called business. When the poor fight back it’s called violence.
[unknown]

Sexuality is completely natural, however mainstream culture and society have falsely turned it into something considered to be controversial and perverse. We should never condemn, fear or distort any of the beautiful and sacred properties of Nature.
[Damien Carrion]

That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

Compassion is to have a sense of concern for others and the community. Look at today’s world—we are interdependent. We can’t think only of my nation’s interests. We have to take the whole world into account. Let us live happily together, helping each other rather than fighting.
[Dalai Lama]

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]

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

– 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]

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]

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.

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]