Another of our irregular round-ups of quotes which have interested or amused …

My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.
[The Dalai Lama]

Earth has boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
[Gustave Flaubert]

Women and cats will do as they please. Men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
[anon]

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.
[Marilyn Monroe]

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
[Harry S Truman]

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
[Eugene McCarthy]

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
[Albert Einstein (allegedly)]

The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
[Dalai Lama]

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
[Leonardo da Vinci]

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
[Annie Dillard]

And I still like …

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
[Borges; Essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”]

If sometimes you feel a little useless, offended or depressed, always remember that you were once the fastest and most victorious little sperm out of millions

Another in our irregular series of quotes encountered which have amused or interested me. In no special order …

I don’t expect much from the Irish — a lot that I know so well that I despise them, everything about them, their posturing, the silly soft accents, their literature, especially Joyce, Synge but not including Yeats who writes like a great anglo — original spare strange — yes Hopkins — and I hate their genius for self-advertisement, their mock-belligerence, their obvious charm.
[Richard Burton, actor; The Richard Burton Diaries]

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory.
[Mahatma Gandhi]

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.
[Mario Andretti]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
[Douglas Adams]

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
[Eric Hoffer]

There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die.
[Hunter S Thompson]

Whether we consider the individual, family, local, national or international level, peace must arise from inner peace. For example, making prayers for peace while continuing to harbor anger is futile. Training the mind and overcoming your anger is much more effective than mere prayer. Anger, hatred and jealousy never solve problems, only affection, concern and respect can do that.
[Dalai Lama]

The cat could very well be man’s best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
[Doug Larson]

Shit happens. That doesn’t make it OK. It’s still bad. That doesn’t excuse it. But excuses aren’t necessary. Moving on is what’s necessary.

[Brad Warner]

Another round-up of quotes recently encountered.

If you know someone who’s depressed please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest and best things you will ever do.
[Stephen Fry]

If you must chose between two evils pick the one you’ve never tried before.
[Walt Whitman]

All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
[Sean O’Casey]

Roman law explicitly set out the who, where and why of cursing. One expert calculated that the Romans had eight hundred ‘dirty’ words. Egyptian lawyers of the same period would seal documents with a hieroglyph which translates as: ‘As for him who shall disregard it, may he be fucked by a donkey.’ The actual hieroglyph? Two big penises, both erect.
[Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

Everyone without exception believes that their own native customs are by far the best … there is plenty of evidence that this is the universal human attitude.
[Herodotus, ca. 440BC, quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

No one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.
[Steven Pinker, 2002, also quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

Obscenity lies not in words or things, but in attitudes that people have about words and things.
[Philologist Allen Walker Read, 1935, and another quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
[John Stuart Mill]

The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.
[Colonel Rainsborough]

Don’t ever do the best you can do. It’s better to be mediocre.
[Terry Allen]
This is certainly true: doing it properly and right first time doesn’t get rewards except more work. It’s the mediocre and even the incompetent who get the rewards because they have the time to shout about how good they are.

Another in our irregular series of quotes I’ve met and enjoyed. You did want some brain hurt, didn’t you …

An example of the sort of ridiculous fluff that I get in art based press releases … “a group of new inter-related works that playfully transform the narratives and forms associated with the models and myths of Western science, art and spirituality into a multivalent personal cosmology and cultural map. Making the irreversible, reversible and the linear, cyclical he plays a choreographer of another logic code of sense and non-sense: a dream of causality.” I haven’t the faintest idea what he is talking about.
[IanVisits on Facebook]

Well, no, neither have I!

The following would, however, explain why I’m always tired …

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
[Albert Camus]

We’re all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love.
[Dr Seuss]

Right on, as usual, Dr Seuss!

I keep trying to convince some of my worry-wart friends of this next …

If you believe everything you read, better not to read.
[Japanese Proverb]

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
[Mark Twain]

Mark Twain with an interesting approach to literary criticism!

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee — that will do them in.
[Bradley’s Bromide]

Yep, that should sort ’em out nicely! And then there’s more mind boggling from New Scientist …

[W]hen he was creating a new password at Nike.com, Terence Kuch was advised to include “At least 1 mixed case letter”. He says he would like to, but “I can’t find any in the alphabet”.
[“Feedback”, New Scientist, 19/01/2013]

The following two quotes appeared in comment articles following the brouhaha in the US about Lena Dunham’s new TV series Girls, in which she (a normally sized and shaped mortal) appears nude.

Truth is, we’d all probably be a lot less neurotic about our own bodies if we could get used to seeing and accepting the natural variety in other people’s — without shame, and giving no fucks.
[]

The naked body is humanity at its most vulnerable and its most truthful, and it should be celebrated not only for its potential to be beautiful but also its potential to be funny, and awkward, and sad, and old, because this in turn is all that we are, and can be.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/helen-charman/what-lena-dunhams-nudity-says-about-us_b_2507635.html]

Yes, absolutely!

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
[Aldous Huxley]

And finally …

Drawing circles, circles; innumerable circles concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of mad art attempting the inconceivable.
[Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent]

Yeah, that’s how my head feels a lot of the time!

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.

[Lawrence Durrell]

Another in our series of quotes I’m come across recently when have interested or amused me. In no special order …

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
[Tom Robbins]

[A] thrombosis of traffic, wherein the veiny and arterial roads of the metropolis are blocked by the embolism of roadworks and by clots that have broken down.
[Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon]

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
[F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up]

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
[Voltaire]

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

Tomorrow (noun). A mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored.
[Unknown]

People died for my right to offend you … we need both love and anger to be free. And you may continue to hate me … Free-thinking is always problematic. But if you take away my freedom … ask yourself who really wins?
[Suzanne Moore]

A catless house is a soulless house.
[Patrick Moore]

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
[Bertolt Brecht]

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

[Dalai Lama]