Another of our occasional round-ups of recently encountered quotes which interested or amused.
The sage falls asleep not because he ought to
Not even because he wants to
But because he is sleepy.
[Raymond Smullyan, The Tao is Silent]
Give up all this advertising of goodness and duty, and people will regain love of their fellows.
[Lao Tsu]
Peace comes from within, do not seek it without.
[Buddha]
I have never understood the Scots, and I defy anybody to understand the Scots.
[Sir Bernard Ingham]
Probably the most tactless woman I ever met.
[Sir Bernard Ingham on Margaret Thatcher]
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
[Alan Watts]
There are three questions you need to ask about any new law: is it necessary, is it workable and will it do more good than harm?
[Original source unknown]
Only idiots refuse to change their minds.
[Brigitte Bardot]
Most of us suspect we’re frauds; few of us will ever produce such memorable proof.
[From http://newpsalmanazar.wordpress.com]
As long as you hate, there will be people to hate.
[George Harrison]
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
[Bertrand Russell]
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
[Ludwig Wittgenstein]
In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That’s all you have.
[Henry Wessel]
I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms. Reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of ‘obligatory pleasure’? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek … If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost – which is not tedious to me – or Don Quixote – which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness.
[Jorge Luis Borges]
We are always the same age inside.
[Gertrude Stein]
In the ‘Book of Life,’ the answers aren’t in the back.
[Charlie Brown by Charles Schulz]

Another small selection of amusing or enlightening quotes encountered recently.
Why do we spend billions of pounds searching for life on other planets, yet we cannot preserve the life on the one we live?
[Seen on Facebook]
If you don’t like gay marriage, blame straight people: they’re the ones who keep having gay babies.
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
[Leonardo da Vinci]
It’s a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done.
[Joseph Campbell]
There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.
[Frank Kafka]
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
[Daniel Webster]
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
[Lao Tzu]
You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.
[Arlo Guthrie]
Recently, someone asked me if I believed in astrology. He seemed somewhat puzzled when I explained that the reason I don’t is because I’m a Gemini.
[Raymond M Smullyan, Five Thousand BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies]
At all costs, the Christian must convince the heathen and the atheist that God exists, in order to save his soul. At all costs, the atheist must convince the Christian that the belief in God is but a childish and primitive superstition, doing enormous harm to the cause of true social progress. And so they battle and storm and bang away at each other. Meanwhile, the Taoist Sage sits quietly by the stream, perhaps with a book of poems, a cup of wine, and some painting materials, enjoying the Tao to his heart’s content, without ever worrying whether or not Tao exists. The Sage has no need to affirm the Tao; he is far too busy enjoying it!
[Raymond M Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent]
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
[Mahatma Gandhi]

Another of our spasmodic collections of inetersting or amusing quotes encountered. In no particular order …
Walk nude, and people won’t need to undress you with their eyes.
Thomas Fuller
Men honour what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.
Chuang Tzu
Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.
Buddha
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
Robert Sarnoff
One thing I have learnt is that transport, rather like banking, is at its best when it is boring. That is when it tends to work.
Alistair Darling
Without deviation progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.
Jules Henri Poincare, 1854-1912
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
GC Lichtenberg
Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.
Found at www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum.html
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and “coincided point for point with it.” But even this map, the size of the empire it described, could not capture the totality of experiences within the empire. Sure, it could tell you exactly where the castle is, or which roads intersected with which others and where, but it couldn’t, for example, tell you what that intersection smelled like.
Rose Eveleth, Seeing Maps of Sounds and Smells
The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.
Lao Tzu
Light thickens, and the crows make wing to the rooky wood.
Macbeth

Our occasional round-up of interesting, inspoiring and amusing quotes (in no special order) …
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
[Leo Tolstoy]
Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The big blue wobbly thing with mermaids living in it.
[Actual description of the sea, overheard in Brighton by my friend Laura Jane Stamps]
The West behaves towards the Islamic world like a monkey with a grenade.
[Dmitry Rogozin, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia]
and when the world around you is in a moment of panic and chaos
and parents are hanging onto their kids
and people are falling to their knees and praying
and people are gathered around screens in bars and saying OH MY GOD
and the noises overhead are either threateningly loud or deafeningly silent
and the fingers start pointing in every direction
and some are shaking in fear
and some are stabbing in anger
and you
may find yourself …
doing what you did as a child
saying hey
have you ever noticed
that
THIS
looks like
THIS?
[Amanda Palmer; http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130529/]
we can only write about what we can see.
we can only connect the dots we collect.
which makes everything you write about you.
what you write is you. what i write is me.
my neighbors, my thoughts, my paranoia, the frightened conversations i overhear, what i read in the news, my childhood drama, my understanding of shakespeare, and odysseus and the wine dark sea, and of the brady bunch, and bukowski. MY connections all go into the stew. that’s all you ever have. you can disguise it in any style, but it’s still you.
[Amanda Palmer; http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130529/]
Anthony Powell said much the same thing but in somewhat different words!
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
[Dalai Lama]
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
[WB Yeats]
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
[Laurens Van der Post]
This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
[Abraham Lincoln]
Clothes make the man, but nakedness makes the human being.
[Scott Adams]
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
If not for sex, much of what is flamboyant and beautiful in nature would not exist. Plants would not bloom. Birds would not sing. Deer would not sprout antlers. Hearts would not beat so fast.
[Olivia Judson, Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation]
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
[Jimi Hendrix]
Childhood is an extended apprenticeship in thinking. We learn both what to think and how to think.
[Tim Bayne, “Thought”, New Scientist, 21/09/2013]
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.
[Douglas Adams]

Another selection from my perusals, in no special sequence …
I chortled so immoderately I filled my codpiece with widdle.
[Katy Wheatley]
To say ‘I wonder’ is to say ‘I question; I ask.’ The mind seeks. Sometimes it finds answers, sometimes it does not. We need wonder in order to keep moving and growing – to stay alive to the world. It gives us meaning and, in fact, makes us human.
[Marian Bantjes; I Wonder]
It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophise, and still leads them.
[Aristotle; Metaphysics]
I’m not weird, I’m limited edition.
[unknown]
I may be a little weird, but I’d rather be weird and right than normal and wrong.
[Paul Stamets, Mycologist]
In the realm of medicine, sham treatments have long had a name: placebos. I suggest we call the equivalent treatments in society “placebos at large”. In fact I want to make the analogy with placebo medicine still closer. In much the same way that we have “invented” witch doctors to provide spells and potions that allow us to overcome the timidity of our bodily healing systems and cure ourselves of physical disease, so we have created witch institutions, witch ceremonies, witch arts to cure ourselves of incipient mental and social disease.
[Nicholas Humphrey, “Placebos at large: the power of society’s symbols”, New Scientist; 03 August 2013]
Life is a disease; sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal
[unknown]
“You see, I don’t mind what happens” … To “accept” the way things are is to stop resisting reality; to stop using positive thinking to try to pretend things are different. Put like that, acceptance seems like a precondition for change, not an obstacle to it.
[Oliver Burkeman writing about Kristnamurti in the Guardian, 10 August 2013]
No event can trigger upset without a belief that it’s undesirable.
[Oliver Burkeman writing about Kristnamurti in the Guardian, 10 August 2013]
Things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements.
[Marcus Aurelius]

Another occasional selection of quotes, in some random order …

The chief advantage of God, after all, is that he doesn’t exist (or at least, he acts as though he doesn’t) so is less of a threat to liberty than a state that aspires to both omniscience and omnipresence.
[The Heresiarch at Heresy Corner]

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
[Bertrand Russell]

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
[Woody Allen]

Much like the panda, pubic lice are being threatened with extinction due to the disappearance of their natural habitat. However this is due to deforestation of another kind – the increased popularity of ‘Brazilian waxing’.
[From a British Association of Dermatologists description of a paper by KS Chen & PD Yesudian, which presents an unproven hypothesis about pubic lice and the television series “Sex in the City”]

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
[Pierre Beaumarchais]

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
[Adlai Stevenson]

Humour is also a way of saying something serious.
[TS Eliot]

This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure … If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.
[Richard Feynman]

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
[Walter Bagehot]

Are we so narrow minded that we show war, murder, rape etc. on TV, but we do not allow to show one of the most wonderful creations (the human body) in its natural form.
[Mario Roman]

Clothes therefore, must be the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things.
[Edgar Rice Burroughs; Tarzan of the Apes]