No Man Is An Island
John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Find this poem online at All Poetry
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled “This could change your life”.
Helen Exley
Welcome to the first of our 2025 collections of quotes, recently encountered.
Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children have a great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness.
[Goethe]
I want to live in a world where being naked in public is normal.
[unknown]
Whatever the reasons, I enjoyed being nude; it felt natural to me. I got the same kind of pleasure from being free of clothing that many people get from being well dressed.
[unknown]
Not everyone can stand the strain of gazing down too long into the personal crater, with its scene of Hieronymus Bosch activities taking place in the depths.
[Anthony Powell; To Keep the Ball Rolling]
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away”. To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it”.
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
[GK Chesterton]
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
[Aldous Huxley]
Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor never the tormented.
[Elíe Wiesel, Roumainian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor]
I simply can’t understand
Why swimsuits are in such demand.
They’re soggy and damp,
Bind like a clamp,
And hold about three pounds of sand.
[DR Benson]
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
[Franz Kafka]
Have you ever thought about how surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours, hallucinating vividly. Isn’t it amazing how words can transport us to different worlds and experiences, all while staying in one place?
[unknown]
The best motto to think about is not waste things. Don’t waste electricity. Don’t waste paper. Don’t waste food. Live the way you want to live but just don’t waste. Look after the natural world, and the animals in it, and the plants in it too. This is their planet as well as ours. Don’t waste them.
[Sir David Attenborough]
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
[Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher]
We can blame HG Wells for popularising the notion that the future will be incomprehensibly alien, totally unlike our world now. Though his novel The Time Machine was fantastical, it reflected a broader cultural view during the industrial revolution that history hadn’t prepared us for what was coming next. Eventually, we might evolve into competing post-human species of underground Morlocks and surface-dwelling Eloi. Echoing Wells, futurists today declare that humans are either on the brink of becoming hyper-evolved cyborgs or paper clips on the desk of a godlike AI.
[Annalee Newitz; New Scientist; 11/01/2025; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26435250-100-ancient-humans-understood-the-future-and-the-past-pretty-much-as-we-do/]
A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong … The spectacle is nearly always comic.
[Lewis H Lapham, editor and writer (1935-2024) in 1989]
[h/t John Monaghan]
Your time on earth is limited. Don’t try to “age with grace”. Age with mischief, audacity and a great story to tell.
[unknown]
Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation
Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity.
Carl Sagan
How have we got to our last monthly collection of quotes for 2024?
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
[Maxímilíen Robespierre]
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
[Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995]
I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
[F Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby]
My naked body is not a sexual display. It is simply a normal, natural, living part of me.
[unknown]
Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.
[Brené Brown; Atlas of the Heart]
I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout in the wind – how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.
[Pierce Brown; Art of Poets]
… understand it as well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.
[Ada Lovelace]
This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful – showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up – and sometimes unhelpful – when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.
[Angus Deaton]
All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. Your house is a garbage processing centre where you buy new things, bring them into your house, and slowly crapify them over time. Objects start at the highest level, visible in a living area. From there it goes down to a closet cupboard or drawer; that’s only why we have these, so we don’t have to see all the huge mistakes we have made. From the closet it goes to the garage – one of the longest phases in trashification; no object has ever made it out of the garage and back into the house – or a personal storage unit. This is the saddest of all. Now instead of free garbage you pay rent to visit your garbage.
[Mike and Joelle; https://www.facebook.com/mikeandjoelleofficial/reels/]
And if you think that a bit of placebo effect, encouragement by
[Dr Rowley Cottingham]
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
[Benjamin Franklin]
And so to the penultimate collection of quotes for this year …
The advert said
MONETISE YOUR FOLLOWERS
so he thought
he would respond;
by painting them
in the changing light,
like waterlilies
in a pond.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
[Albert Camus]
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.
[EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful]
The floor of the House of Commons is little more than a West End theatre.
[DAT Green, Prospect Magazine; 24/10/2024]
Whether a chemical is man-made or natural fells you precisely nothing about how dangerous it is.
[Dr Mark Lorch, Biochemist, University of Hull]
Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
[JRR Tolkien]
I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.
[Richard Feynman]
It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
[Anaïs Nin, (1803-1877)]
If someone has terrible principles, they will at least try to abide by them. If someone has no principles at all, there is no limit to what they’ll do.
[Ian Dunt at https://iandunt.substack.com/p/kemi-badenoch-becomes-tory-leader]
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
[Turkish Proverb]
I heard someone refer to their kids as “sexually transmitted dependents”. I had to turn away before my soda came out of my nose. I thought they were called “crutch goblins”.
[unknown]
Meet me at midnight in the forest of my dreams. We’ll make a fire and count the stars that shimmer above the trees.
[Christy Ann Martine]
Suspending belief because you don’t have enough information does not make you indecisive. Changing your mind when better information comes to light does not make you a hypocrite. Deferring to expertise on complex topics outside your knowledge base does not make you a sheep.
[unknown]
The internet causes village idiots to form entire villages made up only of village idiots who have no idea they are village idiots.
[Vlad Vexler]
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
[George Bernard Shaw]
What? We’re into the last quarter of the year! How? Anyway here’s this month’s collection of quotes amusing and thoughtful – with quite a few slightly longer offerings this time around …
The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
[Tony Puryear, https://www.facebook.com/tony.puryear]
This neatly leads us to the Minkowski view of space and time: we live in a four-dimensional space-time, where three of the dimensions are the space we are familiar with, each of which can be measured in metres. The fourth dimension can also be measured in metres, but we are travelling along it at the velocity c, the speed of light, and we interpret that as the world changing, and that gives us the concept of time. Time doesn’t “flow”; it is just us shooting along that fourth-dimensional axis. The section we have just traversed is the past and is fixed, immutable; while the section ahead is the future and is uncertain, described only by a series of probabilities or possibilities, over which we have limited control.
[John Elliott, quoted in https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg26335081-200-what-would-happen-if-time-stopped/]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]
When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice … the thinker … but the one who is aware of it.
[Eckhart Tolle]
Sometimes those who don’t socialize much aren’t antisocial they just have no tolerance for drama, stupidity, and fake people.
[unknown]
“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing that you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse … It is near impossible to be happy and mentally healthy if you’re spending all your life thinking you’re a failed horse, having others tell you you are a failed horse, when all along you could be thriving and understood if everyone, including you, just knew you were a zebra.
[Quoted in https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/this-is-bleak-you-have-been-warned]
If something won’t matter in 5 years, don’t waste more than 5 minutes worrying about it now.
[unknown]
Brains get good at what they do. Negative thoughts create ‘channels’ in your brain. This way of thinking can become your default. If you do a lot of negative thinking, you wire your brain to be good at producing negative thoughts. Your brain also gets good at seeing things to think negatively about. One of the many byproducts of negative thinking is stress, which then leads to more negative thinking.
[unknown]
Royals have always been terrible people who are mostly just good at stealing money.
[Eleanor Janega, https://going-medieval.com/2024/09/27/on-side-hustles/]
Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible – from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.
[Dwight D Eisenhower]
If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality
[Charlie Warzel at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/]
When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems [of belief] show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism.
[Peter Carroll, quoted in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic]
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[George Carlin]
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
[JRR Tolkien]
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.
[Ursula K Le Guin]
A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.
[Atul Gawande; Being Mortal]
Empathy requires being attuned to the patient’s perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons’ life. Last – and this is where doctors often stumble – empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.
[Danielle Ofri; What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine]
Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
[Oliver Sacks; On the Move]
Be kind to yourself in the year ahead … Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
[Neil Gaiman; Neil Gaiman’s Journal]