My monthly round-up of quotes various I’ve recently encountered.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
[Marcel Duchamp, artist (1887-1968)]

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life”. I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
[Maya Angelou]

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[Douglas Adams]

Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself; I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.
[Groucho Marx]

Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns … It is a weapon … and like any weapon, you need practice to be any good at wielding it.
[Jay Kristoff, Nevernight]

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labour when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
[Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem]

The martin cat long shagged of courage good
Of weazle shape a dweller in the wood
With badger hair long shagged & darting eyes
And lower then the common cat in size
Small head & running on the stoop
Snuffing the ground & hind parts shouldered up
[John Clare ]

Here’s this months collection of recently encountered, miscellaneous quotes.

Facts alone are wanted in life. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else … nothing else will ever be of service to them.
[Charles Dickens, Hard Times]

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
[William Blake]

What is now proved was once only imagined.
[William Blake]

I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
[William Blake]

Combining reason with empathy is a powerful force for good – it is both logical and morally right to see all humans as equal, regardless of sex, gender, race, religion or worldview.
[Prof. Alice Roberts]

the morning after i ‘lost my virginity’

I pulled apart my flesh, counted seven layers deep
for a minute, held my heart, counted eighty solid beats
lips still as red as blood, I spat into the sink
walked into the world again
i hadn’t lost a thing

[Holly McNish]

A fool who knows he is a fool has a little intelligence, but a fool that thinks he is intelligent is really a fool. [Sanskrit Proverb]

A fool is like all other men as long as he remains silent.
[Danish Proverb]

Don’t approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.
[Jewish Proverb]

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.
[Mark Twain]

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it.
[Doris Day]

This is the garden
of being and not being,
of rocks and no rocks.
Here, when you enter and are,
is and is not are equal.
[a Zen waka]

This is a common problem for smart people, especially ones who are highly verbal. They use words as a smoke screen, and it’s all the more effective when their words are true. Less articulate people tend to vent through physicality. They yell, punch, kick, run, scream, sob, dance, jump for joy … I explain. And when I’m done explaining, everything I’ve explained is still stuck inside me, only now it has a label on it.
[Marcus Gedult at https://www.quora.com/When-does-intelligence-become-a-curse/answer/Marcus-Geduld]

Lady Mary was continually exasperated by the exploits of her son Edward, a chap so dissolute and useless that he eventually had no option but to become an MP.
[Caroline Rance at https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/the-pioneering-life-of-mary-wortley-montagu/]

My good lords, I must bring to your attention a grave issue that requires our utmost concern. You see, my fellow land-owning gentry, it seems that the invention of mechanized industry, the rise of “capitalism”, and the impact of the recent plague have brought upon us a wave of moral degradation and irredeemable sloth – specifically, nobody wants to be a serf anymore …
Not only do our current serfs refuse to labor, but the serfs we ejected from our fiefdoms when we feared the plague would harm our profits now don’t want to come back and replace the workers we kept who then subsequently died of the plague. Did they not know that we banished them with the expectation they’d come crawling back at our earliest convenience? What has the world come to when the whims of noblemen no longer control the lives of the masses?
[Andrew Singleton at https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/nobody-wants-to-be-a-serf-anymore]

Welcome to this month’s collection of quotes gleaned from my delvings into obscure knowledge.

We are self-centred and selfish, but we need to be wisely selfish, not foolishly so. If we neglect others, we too lose. We have to support others. We can educate people to understand that the best way to fulfil their own interest is to be concerned about the welfare of others.
[Dalai Lama]

There are no ends in administration. Only loose ends. Administration is eternal.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1394387572533743621?s=09]

England’s response to this public health crisis has been characterised by a lack of transparency – or, even worse, a deliberate suppression of material that is at odds with the Government’s narrative.
[Editorial in British Medical Journal; https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/05/28/the-uks-response-to-new-variants-a-story-of-obfuscation-and-chaos/]

Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie.
[Rory Stewart, former Tory MP and minister]

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
[Terry Pratchett]

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
[William James, American philosopher]

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
[Joseph Campbell]

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
[George Bernard Shaw]

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns, American comedian]

Who also said …

Sex after 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope. Even putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
[Mark Twain]

The Bible is the charter of women’s serfdom, and, as a consequence, of man’s degradation. It, like all superstitious God-books, is the outcome of ignorance ruled by selfishness.
[Lady Florence Dixie, 1855-1905]

Religion says this is the law of God; I say it is that of man. Superstition declares it to be a divine ordinance; I maintain it is a barbaric one. Superstition and barbaric law go hand in hand. It is the former which creates the latter.
[Lady Florence Dixie, 1855-1905]

This month’s selection of quotes which caught my attention …

No one ever commanded a cat. You can shout at a cat, and it may vanish through the window, or ignore you and begin washing its tail, or stare at you in pained surprise. But it will never apologise, never promise not to do it again.
[CR Milne]

Three articles of Civil Service: it takes longer to do things quickly; it is more expensive to do them cheaply; it is more democratic to do them in secret.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1384965488317435911]

[T]oxic masculinity is stopping the servant day labourers of a dying empire from picking out the right avocados for me.
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387525646658777093]

… the normalisation in big cities of getting a grocery servant to pick out whatever you want to cook for lunch that day …
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387476900499570691]

Freckles, moles, scars, cellulite, scabs, pimples, textures, broken capillaries, stretch marks, loose skin, pigmentation, redness, dark circles, birth marks, hair … all belong as a part of the experience of skin. Our skin is alive, dynamic, changing, fascinating and weird. Our surfaces are unique works of art just as they are.
[Ashlee Bennett]

My goal is not just to feel comfortable in my skin. My goal is to feel *so* comfortable in my skin that the patriarchy gets confused, can’t compute, malfunctions, and spontaneously combusts.
[@EmilyDFitness]

Date someone you can be weird as hell with who at the end of the day still wants to get naked with you.
[unknown]

[There’s been] this separation of humanity from nature, mind from body, spirit from intellect, and that we had moved away from this more holistic, spiritual way of seeing the world. Lovelock’s idea of the biosphere as a self-regulating system was antithetical to the view that we could dissect the world and understand all the parts in a deterministic way.
[Suzanne Simard; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033320-900-suzanne-simard-interview-how-i-uncovered-the-hidden-language-of-trees/]

Everything had to always be as it is, Parmenides reasoned, because nothing could come to be out of nothing – nonexistence could not produce existence, because there is no such thing as nonexistence, by definition of existence. Reality consisted in an ever-present, unchanging, unmovable mass of undifferentiated sameness that filled all of space.
[Tom Siegfried; https://www.sciencenews.org/article/anaxagoras-science-athens-history-philosophy]

The one who plants trees, knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
[Rabindranath Tagore]

None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.
[Anthony Hopkins]

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
[Often wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but who first said it?]

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
[Edward Teller; Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics]

Humans are not optimized for intelligence. Rather, we are the first and possibly dumbest species capable of producing a technological civilization.
[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
[unknown]

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.
[unknown]

Being naked starts with your spirit. If you are not allowing yourself to be naked spiritually, being naked physically is significant.
[Stephanie McManus]

Sex is more than an act of pleasure, it’s the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.
[pleasure_portraits; https://www.instagram.com/p/COyilOuBpDD/?igshid=xbn7yul1eb9z; NSFW]