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

Borges wrote that a library is a labyrinth. This is also true – the rows of bookshelves running on for miles, with paths and passageways between them, the classification of the texts working as a kind of cipher that the reader must decode in order to find what she wants. That is only the superficial idea, however. Borges meant that literature is itself a labyrinth, and that every library contains the possibility of infinite places and infinite existences. Open a book in a library and you can disappear into a world, its cities, and its landscapes. All books, in turn, are labyrinths that express the winding shapes of their writers’ imaginations. Each writer builds the labyrinth, and then leads the readers through the myriad possibilities of their tale with a thread like that of Ariadne, guiding them down the paths of their story, wherever it might take them.
[Sofia Grammatiki, quoted at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/28/myth-monsters-and-the-maze-how-writers-fell-in-love-with-the-labyrinth]

In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
[Lao Tzu]

Making others happy is not a question of sacrificing our own happiness. Trying to make others happy, even when we do not always succeed, is a source of great satisfaction. Anger and hatred are signs of weakness, while compassion is a sure sign of strength.
[Dalai Lama]

Any sufficiently oblivious technology is indistinguishable from malice.
[Rose Eveleth]

You don’t have to say anything to the haters. You don’t have to acknowledge them at all. You just wake up every morning and be the best you you can be. And that tends to shut them up.
[Michelle Obama]

Doors closed 15 minutes ago. As we do every evening, we’ve turned all the books upside down so the words don’t fall out overnight. It may seem like a silly waste of time, but ask yourself this; when did you last see piles of words on a Waterstones carpet? That’s right – NEVER.
[https://twitter.com/swanseastones/status/1027234913005830144]

A limerick is seldom essential,
And this one is inconsequential,
Just the standard five lines,
And some dubious rhymes,
And it’s pointlessly self-referential.
[https://twitter.com/daniel_barker/status/1027932616442474498]

The rigid low-sodium diet is insipid, unappetising, monotonous, unacceptable, and intolerable. To stay on it requires the asceticism of a religious zealot.
[Sir George Pickering, about 50 years ago, quoted at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/09/salt-not-as-damaging-to-health-as-previously-thought-says-study]

A Limerick on any occasion
Is great for debate or persuasion,
It dissipates bile
Just by raising a smile:
The perfect poetic equation.
[https://twitter.com/bernardstacey/status/1028189895519596544]

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
[Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche]

GOING TO THE DOGS
My granddad, viewing earth’s worn cogs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his house of logs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in the Flemish bogs.
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his old skin togs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
There’s one thing that I have to state –
The dogs have had a good long wait.
[Anon; quoted at https://www.facebook.com/barnabyjpage/posts/10156805118473487]

Lighthouse-keepers Trinity House own a lot of land alongside Borough High Street, which is why Avon Place … has a bicentennial mural along its length featuring Henry VIII, osteopathy and a fox chewing a brake cable.
[diamond geezer at http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2018/08/51n-6.html]

So, a day late, here is this month’s collection of quotes interesting and amusing.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.
[Jorge Louis Borges]

I’m skeptical of any claims to a special, singular women’s spirituality (just as I’m skeptical of a singular “women’s” anything – including bathrooms).
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]

The Ten Commandments are a warning from an all-powerful, all-knowing God, eternally separate from ourselves, not to do certain things or else He’ll kick our asses. The Buddhist precepts are reminders to trust our own intuitive sense of right and wrong.
[Brad Warner]

Making ethical choices based on external systems of value (societal norms, religious doctrine) seems to me like an insufficient way of going about things because it means I would be using someone else’s definition of reality and someone else’s experience instead of understanding for myself what is good and useful.
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]

The only power the [Buddhist] precepts have, the only power any of this practice has, is the power we give it, the meaning we make of it. This is why I have such a high tolerance for teachers, ceremonies, and ritual; they’re inherently devoid of meaning until I create my own, through and with those external points of reference.
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; Bow First, Ask Questions Later]

“Berks and wankers”
Not every reader will immediately understand these two terms as I use them, but most people, most users of English, habitually distinguish between two types of person whose linguistic habits they deplore if not abhor. For my present purpose these habits exclude the way people say their vowel sounds, not because these are unimportant but because they are hard to notate and at least as hard to write about.
Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.
Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.
In cold fact, most speakers, like most writers left to themselves, try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious, however they might describe the extremes they try to avoid, and this is healthy for them and the language.
[Kingsley Amis; The King’s English (Penguin Modern Classics)]

Being hyper-aware of problems I can do nothing to solve never brought me any joy, nor did it ever make the slightest difference in those problems.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/hitler-sells-but-im-not-buying/5926

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s OK to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
[Ian McEwan; The Cement Garden]

On Friday at Chequers the government will do what it has been doing for the past two years: spend an inordinate amount of time negotiating with itself before producing a ‘solution’ that is unworkable, only to take it to Brussels and discover it is also unacceptable. The problem is not just that they don’t have a rabbit; they don’t even have a hat.
[Gary Younge; Guardian; 6 July 2018]

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral,
The laurel, mead of mighty conquerors
And poets sage, the fir that weepest still,
They yew obedient to the bender’s will,
The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill,
The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill,
The fruitful olive, and the platane round,
The carver holm, the maple seldom sound.
[Edmund Spencer; The Faerie Queene]

The overriding sadness … is that the nation lacks the political leadership required to tackle the 2016 referendum outcome informed as it was by lies, misinformation and the antics of bodies such as Vote Leave … Surely, there is no need to follow a referendum result given that it is now clear that it will lead to ruin.
[Law and Lawyers blog; http://obiterj.blogspot.com/2018/07/uk-eu-future-relationship-uk-proposals_14.html]

An ancient Greek walks into his tailor’s shop with a pair of torn pants.
“Euripides?” says the tailor.
“Yeah, Eumenides?” replies the man.
[Origin unknown]

More next month!

Our usual monthly round-up of quotes, interesting and amusing. Let’s start with a really long quote …

This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I’ve learned about marriage: nothing.

And that’s all I know about love.

[Neil Gaiman]

And now for the rest …

The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
[unknown]

Religion is about acquiring a system of beliefs that are often based on received tradition and cannot be tested. Spirituality, on the other hand, is a quest to know the deeper truths of life for oneself regardless of what tradition says.
[Brad Warner]

If science disproves some aspect of Buddhist belief, then Buddhist belief must change.
[Dalai Lama]

Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that.
[Dr Sabine Hossenfelder, Physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, at
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/why-some-scientists-say-physics-has-gone-rails-ncna879346]

When a man only got his letters in the morning he was pretty safe from surprises for the rest of the day; but with the telegraph he has no remission from anxiety and is on the tenterhooks all day long.
[Philadelphia Medical Times, 1883]

Her legs were longer than seven minutes in heaven with a boy that doesn’t know you’re a lesbian.
[@nebulastucky]

David Davis has mastered a wide range of martial arts, including karate, origami, pastrami, macramé, asti spumante, and Haruki Murakami. He is also a black belt in jujitsu, tiramisu, Nosferatu, Mogadishu, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
[Michael Deacon, Daily Telegraph, 09/06/2018]

I’ve read quite a lot of Raven. The books are basically Trollope written by a sex maniac. His books have their pleasures but he is not in Powell’s league.
[Nick Booth]

The ultimate definition of bravery is not being afraid of who you are.
[Chögyam Trungpa]

Being ordered to be ‘confident’ is like being ordered to be ‘happy’ – just saying it out loud makes it harder for someone to do.
[Girl on the Net, @girlonthenet]

Maybe DNA is a substance that allows molecules to band together into little teams that can, like, go off an have adventures and stuff and, like, y’know, be President of the United States, or work for a car wash in Van Nuys.
Maybe consciousness is a force in the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. Maybe we can’t observe consciousness as an object because it’s the thing that is trying to observe. Maybe consciousness is another name for the act of observation. Or not. What do I know?
[Brad Warner at https://twitter.com/BradWarner/status/1007541226424406016]

There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present. It is the mother of the universe. For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao.
[Lao Tzu]

British children seem under perpetual assault from the three horsemen of the apocalypse: obesity, social media and the manic gods of examination.
Simon Jenkins, Guardian, 15/06/2018]

Our monthly round up of quotes amusing and interesting …

Time – a uniform, universal flow that transports us inexorably from a past we cannot revisit to a future we cannot know.
[Michael Brooks; New Scientist; 18 April 2018]

Note to people without illness / disability: If your response to our statement that we have a problem starts with “Can’t you just…” – shut up. We are not idiots – if a solution is “obvious” then you’re lacking the detail to see why it is flawed.
[@betabetic on Twitter; 20 April 2018]

Naturism offers a way of being that dares to suggest that who we are without any additions or covering up is all we need to be.
[Philip Carr Gomm]

You may say, “I must do something this afternoon”, but actually there is no “this afternoon”. We do things one after the other. That is all.
[Shunryu Suzuki]

Time has no “now”
Einstein’s relativity also says that the passage of time is affected by motion, with moving objects seeing less time passing. So not only does how much time elapses vary from place to place, but different observers looking at the same place but moving at different speeds will see different amounts of time passing.
So even “now” is relative, and you can’t even draw one objectively agreed line between all the points in the universe currently experiencing it. From its own perspective, each event has its own past, formed of those areas from which signals travelling at light speed, the cosmic speed limit, have had time to travel and so influence it. The event also has a future, formed of those areas to which light signals can propagate and feel its influence.
But other observers will see those pasts and futures differently. And outside each of those carefully delimited pasts and futures are vast swathes of the cosmos that are neither past nor future, but also not “now”. Our grammar of time, again born out of local experience, fails to describe what those areas might be.
[New Scientist; 18 April 2018]

The stigma of condoning sex outside a relationship approved by the Church renders politicians incapable of rational thought.
[Tiffer Gilliard]

Women who hate sex workers confuse me. Imagine being so delusional as to think you are somehow inherently worth more than whores because you perform sex acts for FREE as opposed to getting paid for them. What fantasy world do these chicks live in?
[@YEVGEN1YA on Twitter]

I’ve learned that when you try to control everything, you enjoy nothing.

Don’t make excuses for nasty people. You can’t put a flower in an arsehole and call it a vase.

Naturism is … Liberating! The thought of nudity is scarier than nudity itself. When you shed your clothes you also shed just a few of the burdens of everyday life. The feeling of liberation, discovery and freedom is something that you cannot describe.
[British Naturism]

Leaving aside the question whether superstring theory is the right way to combine the known fundamental forces, the approach may have other uses. The theory of strings has many mathematical ties with the quantum field theories of the standard model, and some think that the gauge-gravity correspondence may have applications in condensed matter physics. However, the dosage of string theory in these applications is homeopathic at best.
[Dr Sabine Hossenfelder, Backreaction Blog]

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
[Matsuo Basho]

EU reactions range from the charge that the UK’s ideas are magical thinking to the view that they are “less use than a deodorant”.
[Guardian; 17 May 2018]

Welcome to this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes!

Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.
[Fran Lebowitz]

Faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
[Arthur C Clarke]

Prohibition … goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes … A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln]

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
[HL Mencken]

The convention mis-called “modesty” has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone’s whim – anyone’s diseased caprice.
[Mark Twain]

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]

Capitalism is pretty horrible, but the various attempts at improving on it have either led to totalitarianism or gradually eroded back into capitalism. Or, in the case of modern China, both.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

The way the news reaches us these days, with so much of it either “fake” or “breaking”, is worse than ignorance. It’s a decontextualised screech that monetises its ability to catch our attention, but takes no responsibility for advancing our understanding or avoiding disproportionate damage to our peace of mind.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

[The news is] up-to-the-minute micro-snippets of information about events, the real significance of which will only become evident in many weeks’, months’ or years’ time; it’s like trying to assemble a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Satan’s face by being given one piece every hour, each one accompanied by a bone-rattling fanfare.
Under capitalism, current affairs are presented like this because it makes economic sense. The media generate money by getting our attention and we grant it most reliably not in response to the accurate, illuminating and proportionate, but to the loud, sensational and frightening. That’s a problem we can only solve by ignoring it.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

De-criminalization is not the same thing as endorsement. There is no law against sticking wooden spoons up your ass. That doesn’t mean the state sanctions the use of wooden spoons for that purpose.
[@Grimesweeper on Twitter; 11/04/2018]

I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time. This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us towards life then drags us towards nothingness … We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time . Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.
[Carlo Rovelli; “Time is Elastic“; Guardian; 14/04/2018]

There’s this common misconception that other people have all got their shizz together and we’re failing and flailing. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Life isn’t linear, we’re all kinda making it up as we’re going along because there is no handbook, there is no ‘right’ way and fundamentally, we’re all so different. It’s a shame we feel the pressure to get it ‘right’, when there is no right nor wrong, it’s how we perceive we’ve done based on a prior expectation we held of how we feel we should have done. And that awful comparison game we sometimes play based on what we see on social media, or the bits of people’s lives that they allow us to see. Life is a process of trial and error, there are obstacles aplenty, we cohabit with other people who are trying to find their way too which makes it even more difficult to feel as though we know what we’re doing.
[Blurt Foundation]

We cannot judge … the character of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversation, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real character.
[Maria Edgeworth (Anglo-Irish novelist; 1767-1849)]