OK, so here we are again with this month’s collection of recently encountered, interesting and/or amusing quotes.

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
[Anthony Powell; A Question of Upbringing]

True freedom is being without anxiety about imperfection.
[Sengchen; 6th century Chinese Zen master]

When you work hard to make your relationship work and stay together for a long time, then you each become the person you were meant to be with.
[Haemin Sunim; Korean Buddhist monk]

You’re fine just as you are but you could use little improvement.
[Sunryu Suzuki]

Woodcutters and fishermen know just how to use things. What would they do with fancy chairs and meditation platforms? In straw sandals and with a bamboo staff, I roam three thousand worlds, dwelling by the water, feasting on the wind, year after year.
[Ikkyu]

Sometimes all we need is a hug to make us realise that everything will soon be alright.

If people bought no more books than they intended to read, and no more swords than they intended to use, the two worst trades in Europe would be a bookseller’s and a sword-cutler’s; but luckily for both they are reckoned genteel ornaments.
[Lord Chesterfield]

Many of us haven’t owned a nice box of coloured pencils since we were children. Yet no adult should be without one, because having a range of colours at our fingertips provides a route to a wide array of moods and inspirations. This box knows that colours are connected to the chords of our souls. It includes a booklet about the psychology behind twelve shades, explaining how each of these colours links us to specific memories and feelings.
[From Twitter, apparently from a box of coloured pencils]

There was an old woman from Slough
Who developed a terrible cough
So, she drank half a pint
Of warm honey and mint
But, sadly, she didn’t pull through.
[Seen on Facebook]

Light is known to be fuzzy at the quantum level. With the help of a team in Australia, researchers are sharpening the light by squeezing the fuzziness.
[From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47213202]

So it’s time for another monthly round-up of recently encountered quotes, both meaningful and amusing.

Some people classify Buddhism as a religion. I tend to think of it as a meditation system with 2,500 years of research and development across multiple cultures and eras.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen blog]

We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”
When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry Thomas smirks, that “They’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
[AA Gill, 2016]

The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction. It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.
[Theodosius Dobzhansky; geneticist & evolutionary biologist (1900-75)]

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts – some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.
[Theodosius Dobzhansky; geneticist & evolutionary biologist (1900-75)]

Snowflake is a word used by sociopaths in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy.
[John Cleese]

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.
[Richard Feynman]

Books are many things: energy shots, life-jackets, flying carpets, alarm clocks, oxygen masks, weapons, salves. Who needs what and when can’t be predicted till it happens.
[Jeanette Winterson]

Freud often pointed to the erect posture as the definitive evolutionary achievement of the human being. Straightening our backs and tilting our chins up towards the firmament, we freed our heads from the disgusting and arousing smells of our intimate bodily selves, acquiring the dignity, order and discipline of form.
[Josh Cohen; Guardian; 4 January 2019]

The truth is that life is a lot more mysterious than we give it credit for. Ninety-five per cent of the known universe is utterly unknown and unknowable to us. This isn’t propagated in public discourse enough, because of which people are led to this materialist, reductionist idea of reality which leaves them feeling bereft. It leaves them feeling dead inside and as a result you get more people having breakdowns thinking, “What is the point of it all?” … If you’ve been through those severe experiences you’ve been further out than the rest of us and that’s something beneficial for us. In some ancient communities that was a qualification for being a shaman or a wise person.
[Russell Razzaque]

To be fair to him [Chris Grayling], replacing a system that works with an untested ferry firm with zero ships or shipping experience is one of the most concise Brexit summaries we’ve seen so far. Assuming the government has abandoned Brexit and is now spending 100% of its time creating metaphors for how shit Brexit is going, credit where it’s due – this one is bang on.
[James Felton; Guardian; 4 January 2019]

So here is this month’s un-Christmas-y selection of recently encountered quotes.

I put friend coins in the woman and sex didn’t come out – I think she may be broken.
[unknown]
(Sadly still an all too common belief.)

I’m not an atheist because I’m ignorant of the reality of scripture. I am an atheist because religious scripture is ignorant of reality.
[unknown]

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
[Alan Watts]

A contempt for expertise is inevitably expressed by those who, without experts contributing to society as they do, would be lucky to have a voice to speak with, let alone a platform on which to use it. Expertise, like democracy, is far from infallible; each, however, is always preferable to the alternative.
[David Bennum; Guardian; 31/11/2018; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/30/brexit-britain-crisis-uk]

Don’t think about what can happen in a month. Don’t think about what can happen in a year. Just focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be.
[unknown]

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.
[unknown]

The person we’re … working for is so cool, laid back and unconcerned, I seriously wonder if he moonlights as a jazz correspondent.
[Andrew J Baker]

Asking Maradona what he thinks about Mexican second division football is like asking Beethoven what he thinks about Girls Aloud.
[Adrian Chiles]

My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
[Boris Johnson]

The idea that winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had 18 different words for snow. (All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.)
[Terry Pratchett, The Wyrd Sisters. H/T June Laurenson]

Science is the most beautiful and elegant tool that humanity has yet developed with which to actually investigate the physical universe, to measure it, to test it. Science evolved out of magic.
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

If you think that every second is eternal, don’t do anything that you can’t live with forever.
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

What if there were creatures, entities, that were made up purely of ideas, purely of language or something – wouldn’t that explain everything from Smurfs to gods, to demons, to angels, to leprechauns, to all of this nonsense that we have been obsessed with throughout our development as a species?
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

The Fates permitting, we’ll see you on the other side of the festivities.

Welcome to our latest monthly series of quotes amusing and thought-provoking.

You don’t have to be positive all the time. It’s perfectly okay to feel sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, scared or anxious. Having feelings doesn’t make you a negative person, it makes you human.
[Lori Deschene]

Be well advised and assured what matter you put in his head: for you shall never pull it out again.
[Cardinal Wolsey]

It is a great relief to find that we can accept all things for what they are, whether miracles or tragedies.
[Christmas Humphreys]

In autumn there were days of fog that called the truth of everyday experience into question.
[Esther Kinsky, River]

Is there a book you really wish you’d written yourself? A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. That book was a fascinating primer for me in how to write a sequence of books with the same cast of characters, and having the main character age along the way. This notion that life is a dance to the music of time – if you’re writing a series it’s crucial to know how to do it.
[Ian Rankin, Guardian, 3 November 2018]

Having anxiety and depression is like being scared and tired at the same time. It’s the fear of failure, but no urge to be productive. It’s wanting friends, but hating socializing. It’s wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely. It’s caring about everything, then caring about nothing. It’s feeling everything at once, then feeling paralysingly numb.
[unknown]

If a system can be gamed, someone or something will game it.
For example …
Reward a simulated car for continuously going at high speed, and it will learn to rapidly spin in a circle.
Or alternatively …
I hooked a neural network up to my Roomba. I wanted it to learn to navigate without bumping into things, so I set up a reward scheme to encourage speed and discourage hitting the bumper sensors. It learnt to drive backwards, because there are no bumpers on the back.
[Quoted at http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/self-driving-car-rewarded-for-speed.html]

Trying to make science efficient requires figuring out what “efficient science” would be.
[Sean S, in a comment at http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/self-driving-car-rewarded-for-speed.html]

Fascists, to begin with, can seem [feckless] at the start, but because they lack any sort of civilized inhibitions, they forge ahead, intent on winning their way at whatever cost to others. Even worse, they believe … in their definition of duty and success without any of the qualms or reservations that trouble finer sensibilities.
[Carl Rollyson, “Anthony Powell and his People” at
https://www.weeklystandard.com/carl-rollyson/anthony-powell-and-his-people]

We all seem to have a good idea of what useful advice is: using our knowledge and experience to tell others how to narrow down their options and zero in on the right move. But new research … shows that there is a better way to approach advice. People seeking advice are generally not interested in being told what to do, but in gathering information so that they will have more alternatives and perspectives to consider. This mismatch causes problems: the advice we give others ends up being less helpful, the recipients don’t follow our recommendations, and we view them negatively as a result.
[Francesca Gino, “How to Give Better Advice” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-give-better-advice/]

No notion espoused by an economist of whatever leaning has had any greater predictive power than a chimp trying to choose a winning horse at the Grand National.
[Letter from Sam Edge at https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg24032032-300-folk-economic-beliefs-are-not-so-stupid-2/]

Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all, like Donald Trump, reality TV stars … In the media circus, the clowns have the starring roles. And clowns in politics are dangerous.
[George Monbiot at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/03/cult-personality-politics-boris-trump-corbyn-george-monbiot]

Our monthly round up of quotes interesting and amusing.

What Dungeness has [is] the sense that it has remained so relatively unchanged, escaping the prissy tedium of the rest of south east England … the convention by which all of the south east must become one giant, government-approved suburb. Here, it feels as if planning laws have never existed. There are no polite and bricky executive cul-de-sacs, no banal shopping malls, no air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit office blocks, no golf courses, neat kerbstones, yellow lines, speed bumps, no traffic wardens or CCTY cameras, no bored and boring yoof lurking under medieval hoods on street corners. Physically, socially and emotionally, Dungeness is a very long way from Middle England.
[Jonathan Glancy in Nigel Green, Dungeness (Photoworks, 2003)]

The reality of our century is technology – the invention, construction and maintenance of the machine. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of the century. It has replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras.
[Moholy Nagy, 1922]

The concept of connectedness is, of course, the basis of all kinship systems … Getting married, in this case, is not just pairing off, it is, in a way, sharing each other.
[Stephen Muecke quoted in the Guardian]

Intolerance for the indefensible becomes intolerance for anything that is different. The aspiration for the universal becomes a crude insistence on the uniform. Sensitivity is lost to the very different needs of different cultures at different times and places.
[From the Guardian]

There is a contradiction in saying there are no universal truths, since that is itself a universal claim about the nature of truth.
[From the Guardian]

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.
[Gandhi, quoted in the Guardian]

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.
[Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities]

Sometimes it’s better to take life as it comes, set your sails according to the winds that blow, go with the tide, follow your instinct, choose the grassier, less trodden road for its own sake and not in the hope it might lead anywhere very special.
[Christopher Robin Milne]

We can’t know anything outside our mind. Everything we see is contained within our mind. Thus, I am not in the world. The world is in me.
[Haemin Sunim]

Honesty is the glue that holds together a society of laws. Lies are the solvent that dissolves those bonds.
[From the Washington Post]

You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.
[Warren Buffett]

Just a reminder: the system in what is currently known as the US isn’t “broken”. It was designed by male white supremacist slave owners on stolen indigenous land to protect their interests. It’s working as it was designed.
[Dr Adrienne Keene on Facebook]

In our quest for happiness and the avoidance of suffering, we are all fundamentally the same, and therefore equal. Despite the characteristics that differentiate us – race, language, religion, gender, wealth and many others – we are all equal in terms of our basic humanity.
[Dalai Lama]

Only having “compassion” for those who are in your in-group, and vilifying or even becoming violent toward those who you perceive as the out-group, is not only antithetical to world peace more broadly, but is also counter-productive to political progress that advances the greater good of all humans on this planet.
[Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific American, 8 October 2018]

And finally …

If you ever think your job is pointless, just remember there is a bloke in Germany who puts indicators on BMW cars.

So here we are again with this months collection of quotes weird and wonderful!

VESPERS
Hush! Hush. Whisper who dares!
Little boy sits at the foot of the stairs.
Blood on his fingers
And fur on the mat:
Christopher Robin’s castrated the cat!
[John Hein]

Golden-haired boy on the edge of the street
In his tight blue jeans on his lonely beat.
Hush! Hush!
I’m rather afraid
Christopher Robin is looking for trade.
[John Hein]

You cannot overestimate the stupidity of people, yourself especially.
[Robyn Hitchcock]

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by travelling.
[Miguel do Unamuno]

I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we have gone, our voices will linger in these walls.
[unknown]

Faced with a choice between contributors offering an honest and considered assessment or mendacious buffoons with a talent for attracting attention, the BBC will consistently choose the latter. By this means it systematically distorts national life.
[George Monbiot]

Way down deep in the middle of the Congo, 
A hippo took an apricot, a guava and a mango. 
He stuck it with the others, and he danced a dainty tango. 
The rhino said …
‘My testicle was so big, you could play it like a bongo’.
[https://twitter.com/ed_son/status/1038321780010766336]

“History” is not derived from “his story”. It’s from the Greek ἱστορία, historia, which means “inquiry”.
[Rose Eveleth]

Wellness uses terms that sound like a dog whistle for the patriarchy. Pure. Clean. Natural. This could easily be advertising for America’s next virgin bride, not a pathway to health.
[Dr Jennifer Gunter]

If we’re not supposed to have midnight snacks, why is there a light in the fridge?
[Stephen Rodda]

If people can’t face up to the fact of other people being naked … then we’re never going to get anywhere.
[John Lennon]

“I’ve often been asked, ‘What do you old folks do now that you’re retired?’ Well … I’m fortunate to have a chemical engineering background and one of the things I enjoy most is converting beer, wine and vodka into urine. I do it every day and I really enjoy it.”
[unknown]