Another mid-monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing …
The pain of being alone motivates us to seek the safety of companionship, which in turn benefits the species by encouraging group cooperation and protection. Loneliness persists because it provides an essential evolutionary benefit for social animals. Like thirst, hunger or pain, loneliness is an aversive state that animals seek to resolve, improving their long-term survival.
[Emily Singer; Quanta Magazine]
You can’t let one setback ruin your life. You’ve got to just keep being a squirrel.
[Mikel Delgado quoted at ]
Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate’. Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need’. It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
[From A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living]
It may be remarked with equal truth that ignorance is often the effect of wonder. It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of enquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate enquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive, they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing, and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties.
[Samuel Johnson]
To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
[Lao Tzu]
With all this opportunity, this comedy and tragedy, how near all men come to doing nothing!
[Henry David Thoreau; Journal; 29 May 1857]
We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
The difference between lying and bullshit is less a question of a statement’s relation to the truth than of the motivation of the person making it. A liar wants his audience to believe what he says; a bullshitter doesn’t care, as long as he gets what he wants.
[Harry Frankfurt]
The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity. For this reason, he has integrity.
[Lao Tzu]
When you are in your middle seventies you have passed your prime as a cat-catcher.
[PG Wodehouse]

Our mid-monthly round up of recently encountered quotes, inspirational, educational and amusing.
If porn is inherently & in all contexts destructive, then SEX is inherently & in all contexts destructive.
[Emily Nagoski]
Most people can’t fathom why naturist families have such positive, wholesome relationships. Children from clothes free families grow up with relatively few body confidence issues.
[British Naturism]
Save the Earth; don’t give birth. This is the really radical ecological message people aren’t willing to face: the most damaging thing you can do environmentally is breed.
[Mark Walsh & Dane Burman quoted on Facebook]
It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.
[Bill Murray]
I sympathise a little with Hunt [UK Health Secretary] — he was born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, went to Charterhouse, then Oxford, then into PR: trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked student nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner. Hunt doesn’t understand the need to pay doctors — he’s part of a ruling class that doesn’t understand that the desire to cut someone open and rearrange their internal organs can come from a desire to help others, and not just because of insanity caused by hereditary syphilis.
[Frankie Boyle]
You go through life blind but with the delusion of sight. Try not to be fooled by what you think you see & what other people think they see.
[Brad Warner on Twitter]
The proposals the Secretary of State outlined did not appear to depart significantly from the Human Rights Act — we note in particular that all the rights contained within the ECHR are likely to be affirmed in any British Bill of Rights. His evidence left us unsure why a British Bill of Rights was really necessary.
… … …
If a Bill of Rights is not intended to change significantly the protection of human rights in the UK, we recommend the Government give careful thought before proceeding with this policy.
… … …
Given the seemingly limited aims of the proposed Bill of Rights, the Government should give careful consideration to whether, in the words of the Secretary of State, it means unravelling “the constitutional knitting for very little”. If for no other reason, the possible constitutional disruption involving the devolved administrations should weigh against proceeding with this reform.
[House of Lords European Union Select Committee; Report The UK, the EU and a British Bill of Rights; May 2016]
To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom … You consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.
[Barrack Obama]
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has twice mentioned weights and measures authorities enforcing this [tobacco regulations] in a heavy-handed or a light-touch way. Can the Minister comment on which he thinks they will do?
Lord Prior [the Minister]: I certainly hope that enforcement will be more Italian than traditionally British, if I may put it that way.
[House of Lords debate on the new Tobacco Regulations from the EU]
Wind chimes are made from the metallic bones of robots that tried to overthrow us. Hang them outside your house as a warning to the others.
When you are dead, you don’t know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid.
Not every day is a good day,
live anyway.
Not everyone tells the truth,
trust anyway.
Not everyone will love you back,
love anyway.
Not every game will be fair,
play anyway.
We act as if the Earth was a craft ball someone told us to bedazzle.
[Rob R Dunn]

Here’s our monthly round up of interesting, inspiring or amusing quotes encountered in the last few weeks. In no special order …
… one of the great mantras of our times, that anything bad that happens to us must be somebody else’s fault. It cannot be us who are to blame …
[Christopher Snowdon at Spectator Health]
No cookbook can cure the fact that we are meat rotting from the inside, unable to recapture the fading glow of youth.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
[Mark Twain]
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
[President Kennedy]
As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.
[HL Mencken]
I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.
[Tony Benn]
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
[HL Mencken]
Brexit is like the English civil war, when families and friends found themselves split between King and parliament. Other historical divides — as over the reformation, the corn laws or Irish home rule — tended to cohere round religion or self-interest.
[Simon Jenkins; Guardian; 31 March 2016]
Political psychologists increasingly dismiss reason as having any role in electoral decision … Thus Brexit. It is declining into a sort of primitivism, a debate over what is inherently unknown. Argument is hijacked by hobgoblins.
[Simon Jenkins; Guardian; 31 March 2016]
Battle not with voles, lest ye become a vole; for if you gaze into the burrow, the burrow gazes back into you.
Dogs are for people who need to be worshiped as gods. Cats are for people who are strong enough to put up with gods standing on their chests at 5:00 AM and demanding a sacrifice.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
[Groucho Marx]
Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
[Richard Branson]
Machiavelli defines the central thrust of human nature as ambition, the drive for power bringing with it wealth and corruption.
[Sarah Dunant; BBC News Magazine]
Being a little weird is just a natural side-effect of being awesome.
[Sue Fitzmaurice]
More next month.

Our mid-month round-up of the amusing and thought-provoking wisdom of the world recently encountered …
Guess what? Birth is grisly, living is a messy business, and dying is fucking horrendous. Health care is at the gritty end of things. That’s its job. That’s what it does. We don’t expect it to look lovely. We don’t expect it to speak nicely, and wear expensive clothes. We expect it to work. We expect it to get down into the guts of the matter and fix things. It needs to fix people. It needs to fix lives. It needs to help us give birth, it needs to ease living, and soothe the dying. It isn’t about forms and management committees and balance sheets, not where it really matters.
[Katy Wheatley]
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible Nature … without realizing that this Nature he slaughters is this invisible God he worships.
[Hubert Reeves]
[T]he close ties between a family and their GP is rapidly coming to an end. The politicians do not seem to understand that General Practice is not just about making a diagnosis and giving someone the ‘correct’ treatment in the shortest time possible. Although this is important, it is also about trust, compassion, reassurance, inter-relationships, life and support — most of which is not measurable and can only successfully be achieved once you’ve developed an on-going relationship in which a person has faith and trust in their doctor and the doctor has faith, trust and an understanding of the history (physical, social and psychological) of their patient.
[Dr Jonathan Lenten, Leicester]
People feel uncomfortable expressing views that Gordon Brown would have described as bigoted, but they feel them anyway, and so politicians and pundits come up with safe proxies to use.
Immigrants take jobs. Immigrants take benefits. Immigrants take without contributing.
It’s a soft xenophobia about strange other people with their strange ways, packaged into a Tesco Value political argument about the cost of migration on the UK Government’s rather overdrawn bank account.
[Ian Mansfield at IanVisits]
Chores on a morning as grim as double maths. Two magpies cross the back of the class like naughty paper aeroplanes.
[Simon Barnes on Twitter]
Small children are justified in being conspiracy theorists, since their world is run by an inscrutable and all-powerful organization possessing secret communications and mysterious powers — a world of adults, who act by a system of rules that children gradually master as they grow up.
[Thomas Griffiths & Joshua Tenenbaum in a 2006 study on coincidences]
The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
[Warren Buffett]
The same number of doctors with a lower limit on maximum hours, providing the same level of care, across more days.
[Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health quoted in the Daily Telegraph]
[Compare with NASA’s much reviled desire for “Faster, Better, Cheaper”. Neither computes.]
I may be a Guardian contributor, but I still draw the line at spending upwards of £5 for a worryingly-green “energising smoothie” or some other crap. Maybe it’s my working class background, but I can’t contemplate paying paper money for a bottle of denser-than-average pond water.
[Dean Burnett, Guardian, 11/03/2016]
Court at your peril those spirits that dabble lasciviously with primeval matter, horrid substances, sperm of the world, producing monsters and fantastic things, as it is written, so that the toad, this leprous earth, eats up the eagle.
[Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings]
No government or party comes towards smokers with a position of policy purity — it is an income stream.
[Australian Federal MP Ewen Jones]

OK, so here goes with our monthly (mid-month) round-up of the amusing and thought-provoking wisdom of the world recently encountered. In no special order …
Clutter is not just physical stuff. It’s old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.
[Eleanor Brownn]
One awesome thing about Eeyore is that even though he is basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and shenanigans with all of his friends. And they never expect him to pretend to feel happy, they just love him anyway, and they never leave him behind or ask him to change.
[David Wolfe]
The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.
[Dalai Lama]
Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb but how well you bounce.
[Vivian Komori]
Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs.
[Adam Gopnik]
Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
[George Orwell]
We had a sermon a while back from our pastor talking about how shaming someone is to go against everything Christian. Yet children are natural nudists. The only way to keep them dressed is to teach them shame. “Don’t pull up your dress &,dash; someone will see your panties.” “Don’t go outside naked — someone will see your penis.” This occurs again and again until there is a wall of shame. Is nudity a dangerous path? I believe shame is far worse.
[“Jon” quoted in Naturist Life International]
“Consensual sex” is just sex. To say that implies that there is such a thing as “non consensual sex”, which there isn’t. That’s rape. That is what it needs to be called. There is only sex or rape. Do not teach people that rape is just another type of sex. They are two very separate events. You wouldn’t say “breathing swimming” and “non-breathing swimming”, you say swimming and drowning.
One of the best things about getting older: knowing that someone is an arsehole before they even speak.
Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and who, in his natural actions, withdraws & hides himself from his own kind.
If God declared our unclothed naked bodies to be VERY GOOD on day 6th day of creation. THEN THEY MUST BE SO.
A fellow who I helped write two books about psychology and psychiatry was a renowned psychiatrist in London called Robin Skynner said something very interesting to me. He said, “If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behaviour.” And when you’re around super-sensitive people, you cannot relax and be spontaneous because you have no idea what’s going to upset them next. And that’s why I’ve been warned recently don’t to go to most university campuses because the political correctness has been taken from being a good idea, which is let’s not be mean in particular to people who are not able to look after themselves very well — that’s a good idea — to the point where any kind of criticism or any individual or group could be labelled cruel.
[John Cleese]
Christianity. The popular belief that a celestial Jewish baby who is also his own father, born from a virgin mother, died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and then make you live forever only if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your lord & master so he can remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because an immoral woman made from a man’s rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile possessed by an malicious angel to secretly eat forbidden fruit from a magical tree.
He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
[Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer, 1737-1809. With thanks to John Monaghan]