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)]

Here’s this month’s selection of quotes, various, for your delectation.

That gay free-thinker, a fine talker once,
What turns him now a stupid silent dunce?
Some God, or spirit he has lately found;
Or chanc’d to meet a minister that frown’d.
Judge we by nature? Habit can efface,
Interest o’ercome, or policy take place:
By action? those uncertainty divides:
By passions? These dissimulation hides:
Find, if you can, in what you cannot change.
Manner with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times.
[Alexander Pope (1688-1744); Moral Essays, Epistle I]

The great generational divide today is between those who know where they are going and how to get there, and those who know how to enter an address onto their phone.
[Terry Cowan]

Shall I compare thee to a blinkered dog?
Thou hast been lied to by the wealthy pack,
Tough truths do shake the Brexit facts of Mogg
And Nigel’s speech is all too short on fact.
Sometimes too hot the air of Boris seems,
And often is his tousled brain confused;
Though every prophet plays upon your dreams
With rhetoric, or twisted argument abused.
But Europe’s constant peacetime will not fade
Nor lose the vision of cohesive might,
Nor shall Gove brag of benefits to trade
When single markets are so obviously right.
   So long as voters breathe they’ll counter May,
   So long lives Europe – better with UK.
[Bernard Stacey]

Mary had a little lamb
It ran into a pylon
10,000 volts went up it’s arse
And turned it’s wool to nylon.

1. Apologize to children when you are wrong.
2. Do not assume you’re smarter than a child simply because you’re older.
3. Say thank you to children when they do something for you or others.
4. Admit when you’ve made a mistake and admit it openly to them.
5. Listen to children.
[@BEautifully_C on Twitter]

We schoolmasters must always temper discretion with deceit.
[Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall]

The EU Single Market was largely completed for goods by 1992 but development remains on-going with regard to services. The Single Market enables free movement of goods but also of people, services and capital … It is [a] type of enhanced free-trade area in which goods move freely, but so do services, investment and people. To achieve this … the EU needs to get involved in harmonising regulations across the single market. This is why there are much-maligned rules on, for instance, the efficiency of vacuum cleaners across the EU. In the absence of such regulations there would be a regulatory race-to-the-bottom: countries would compete to produce the cheapest-possible vacuum cleaner across the EU, sacrificing safety in the process. It also explains why there is free movement of people: this allows for the exchange of typically non-tradable goods, such as plumbing.
[http://obiterj.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/trade-bill-vague-amendment.html]

We are just something the sun does to chemicals if you leave it for a few billion years.
[Brad Warner]

The blithe confidence of the British Establishment, which believes that, through bluster, aggression and talking loudly at foreigners, it can achieve anything, however unlikely
[George Monbiot]

The more I look at Brexit, the more it looks like the Iraq War. No one in power can explain why it’s necessary, no one knows how to pull it off, and no one knows how to get out when it goes horribly wrong.
[George Monbiot]

Exciting perks of adulthood:
1. Busy! Busy all the time! What are you even doing? You don’t know!
2. Very tired.
3. Some kinda stomach ache???
4. Definitely sad about something.
5. Bills! Bills all the time! What are you even paying for? You don’t know!
@marcformarc

The Yogacara school [of Buddhism] doesn’t believe that everything in the universe is all in the mind. Not exactly. But they do believe that whatever we know of the universe comes through our minds. They believe there’s no such thing as objective knowledge. This doesn’t exactly mean there’s no objective Truth. Just that we can’t really see the truth as it is without it being coloured by our mental processes. They, therefore, believe that the study of the workings of the mind is the most direct way to understand the universe in which we find ourselves.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/dancing-with-libtards-and-fascists/5778]

What are we to think about witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, 20 or 30 at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive?
[Malleus Maleficarum (1487)]

I have just come across (pun intended) an article for women on how to have better orgasms, which includes the phrases “Sacred Feminine Energy”, “be a goddess”, “awaken your sacral chakra”, “learn ecstatic breathing”, but at no point does it say “wank more”. I GIVE UP.
[Zoe Margolis]

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
[Stephen Hawking]

Thinking how space-time used to be is like a fish trying to imagine steam.
[Dr Daniele Oriti, Max Planck Institute, Germany]

I think the use of time machines will have to be strictly controlled. Because as soon as lots of people have time machines, things will start getting really crazy.
[Brad Warner]

[A]utomation comes for us all eventually. Witness the birth of Goob, the computer-assisted lifestyle magazine from Botnik.org. By training a predictive text generator on a library of material from Goop, Botnik was able to produce an even more adventurous brand. Goob subscribers can browse products such as Chicago Dad Soothing Mortgage Advice Salve (“get back to the realm of your own essence”) and “Cancer Gossip Jeans”, all wrapped up in bold headlines such as “Is the soul more supple when you’ve been divorced? We asked two dogs for some advice.”
[Feedback, New Scientist, 17/03/2018]

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
[Groucho Marx]