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]

A few more quotes encountered, for the amusement of those hereabouts. As usual in no special order.

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory.
[Paul Fix]

Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
[Laurence J Peter]

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
[Charles Bukowski]

The appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a man’s circumstances, but to his behaviour in them.
[Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) in The Tatler]

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
[Niels Bohr]

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law … Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.
[Derek Jarman]

Being childfree or childless is a choice for some, a struggle for others. It’s tough to be childfree/childless in our child- and parent-centric society — especially for women. We are questioned, judged, told we’ll change our minds, etc.
[unknown]

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.
[Anatole France]
I’d add: and knowing how to find out when you don’t know.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
[Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905]

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
[Ogden Nash]

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
[Malcolm Forbes]

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

[George Bernard Shaw]

A few more recently encountered quotes …

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
[Sir Peter Medawar]

It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
[GH Hardy]

It is not wrong to question things … The fact that you’re asking questions shows that you’re five levels of wisdom above the idiot who’s objecting to you asking the questions.
[Josh Tolley]

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colourful life imaginable.
[Robert Pattinson]

High level concepts such as intentions, meanings, thoughts, and so on, which we associate only with minds, must have had evolutionary precursors in a more or less gradual sequence. The problem is that we do not have a clear concept of what the simplest “intention”, “meaning”, or “thought”” might look like. This is because psychology has traditionally been defined by only highly evolved “mental” activity, so that even though we study brains at the cellular or even molecular levels, there is the tacit belief that no real psychology can exist at a simple level.
[Howard Pattee, “Cell Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach to the Symbol-Matter Problem” (1982 paper) in Pattee & Rączaszek-Leonardi (eds), Laws, Language and Life (2013)]

After we invented software we could see that we were surrounded by software. DNA is a universal programming language and biology can be thought of as software archaeology – looking at very old, very complicated software.
[Gregory Chaitin, mathematician]

Cat. (noun) A small domesticated carnivorous mammal (Felis catus), with soft fur, a short snout, and retractile claws. Thought to be entirely solar powered.
[unknown]

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.
[Robert Heinlein]

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
[Fran Lebowitz]