We shouldn’t expect to cope with infinity as we have only brain mechanisms for things useful to an ancestor. Any ancestor worrying about the size of the universe didn’t see the tiger creeping up and was removed from the gene pool.
[Unknown Author]
Category Archives: quotes
Quotes of the Week
This week’s selection of quotes which caught my eye during the last week …
Everyone has a photographic memory … Some just don’t have film.
[Thoughts of Angel]
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
Which links quite nicely to the following two …
We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]
As we have found, time and again, informers have often a need to create information. They are ‘projectors’ who provoke or indeed invent dangerous sentiments in order to denounce them. They are ‘politicians’ in that pejorative Elizabethan sense, the sense in which Shakespeare means it when King Lear says, ‘Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not’.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]
Listography – Top Five Keywords
As regular readers will know I don’t always do Kate’s weekly Listography — sometimes because I just don’t get time and sometimes because the subject doesn’t fire me with enthusiasm. But this week Kate is asking us something simple: list the top five keyword searches on your weblog (excepting the name of the weblog and keywords like “blogger”). So I can hardly refuse, especially as whenever I see anyone listing the searches used to find their weblogs they’re usually either a scream or completely unbelievable!
Will mine be any different? In a word, No …
At #1 we have pheasant. Yep really. Four times the number of hits of its nearest competitor! Everyone seems to have liked my December 2009 recipe for Pheasant Casserole.
#2 is the quite shocking pussy porn. I guess, guys, you were sadly disappointed to find this, this or this.
#3 is perhaps the equally worrying, and equally disappointing, dumb blonde.
At #4 we have another search for pornography: osho on porn. But this time it is a serious article.
Finally at #5 we go from the sublime(?) to the ridiculous with the search woodpecker feet. Well, yes, I really did write a post about woodpecker feet!
In the words of JBS Haldane:
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Quotes of the Week : On Beauty
This week several quotes about beauty …
Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.
[Gwyneth Paltrow]
Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.
[Fay Weldon]
Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.
[Kahlil Gibran]
Looking into someone’s eyes and knowing that you have loved them for ever. That’s beauty.
[Tracey Emin]
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
[Confucius]
Ten Things – October
Number 10 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.
Something I Like: Tea- Something I Won’t Do: Halloween
- Something I Want To Do: Fly on Flightdeck of an Airliner
- A Blog I Like: Bad Science
- A Book I Like: Nick McCamley; Secret Underground Cities: an Account of Some of Britain’s Subterranean Defence, Factory and Storage Sites in the Second World War
- Some Music I Like: Moody Blues, Octave
- A Food I Like: Swiss Chard
- A Food or Drink I Dislike: Milk
- A Word I Like: Persiflage
- A Quote I Like: Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know? [Groucho Marx]
Quotes of the Week
Well let’s start this week’s selection where we left off last week, with something from John Aubrey …
Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.
[Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
[Isaac Asimov in Newsweek, 21 January 1980]
I discovered books and music while everyone else got into drugs. Books and music were my drugs. What I read and listened to then shaped and changed my life forever.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
I find being middle aged rather liberating. I wear what I like. I eat what I like. I listen to and watch what I like. I do not feel ashamed of anything that makes me happy and makes my life feel richer, better and more joyous.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
Katy, dearest, how many more times do I have to tell you that you aren’t middle aged? You can’t be middle aged — you’re younger than I am! Anyway I’m not having it, if only because if you’re middle aged then I’m senile and I ain’t ready for that yet.
To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as an easy way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
[John Perry, University of Stanford, Winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel for Literature]
And finally, confirmation from an unknown source of what we all suspected …
Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.
Quotes of the Week
Well there’s just one good quote this week …
I have a very proper present for your Lordship. I know your love of antiquities makes you a little superstitious. I have an elderstick, that was cut in the minute that the sun entered Taurus. Such a planetary cutting of it gives virtue to stop bleeding to which you know you are subject. If you desire to know more of the time and manner of cutting it, you must consult Aubrey’s Miscellanies. You may meet with it without doubt amongst your father’s collection of mad books.
[Dr William Stratford writing to Edward Harley (son of the Earl of Oxford), 28 June 1711, quoted in Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]
Quotes of the Week
Oooo … have we got a thought-provoking bunch this week!
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
[William James]
Life is short, smile while you still have teeth!
[Thoughts of Angel]
A shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale wishes “there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]
[Natural] Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them – angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling – then how did those traits survive selection?
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]
If there was a God, why on earth would he want us to ‘believe’ and/or ‘have faith’? Given that he (she or it) is omnipotent, and can therefore by definition do anything that he wants, why doesn’t he just make us have faith/belief hard-wired into our brains? Also, can anybody think of reasons why he would care if we have faith or if we just merrily go on ignoring him? I’m genuinely puzzled by this.
[Keith J at cix:enquire_within/54discussion]
For what are we if we are not words made flesh, or flesh expressing our meaning in words? We are memories, thoughts, feelings, ideas, pain, anguish, love, amusement, boredom, hopes and dreams. We are all these things in a sheath of skin, making our way into the unknown, and if we cannot capture it, think about it, reflect on it and own it, what do we have?
[Katyboo]
I visualize the ego as a little guy in a gray flannel suit and tight necktie. His job is to get you safely through your waking day, to make sure that you pay your electric bill and don’t offend the boss. He keeps up a constant chatter, telling you to do this or that, and insisting that you pay attention to what’s happening in the world around you. He takes occasional coffee breaks, like when you’ve driven down a familiar road, and realize when you arrive home that you have no memory of the trip. The ego has taken time out, figuring you can get home on automatic pilot. He’s grateful when you finally retire for the night. He’s got you in a safe place – your bedroom – where nothing is likely to happen to you. He pops up again in the morning, when you “wake down” from your wider experiences in the sleep state. He’s the character who makes you look at the clock (“time” only exists in its usual sense when the ego is on the job) and nags you into getting out of bed and on your way to work. Jealous of the time you spend in your right brain, he likes to insist he’s been around all the time. He hates to admit that his job isn’t all there is to your experience, so he makes sure you forget your dreams. He’s especially good at pretending he’s never off the job. “I wasn’t asleep, or not paying attention. I was just resting my eyes. I heard everything you said,” he insists indignantly when you catch him at one of his coffee breaks, such as when you are wool-gathering, sleeping, or under hypnosis.
[Helen Wambach, Reliving Past Lives]
Word of the Week
Exoteric.
Comprehensible to or suited to the public.
Current among the outside public; popular, ordinary.
Pertaining to the outside.
Compare with Esoteric.
Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples.
Communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively.
Pertaining to a select circle; private, confidential.
Quotes of the Week
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
[Richard Francis Burton]
Children in the dark cause accidents … accidents in the dark cause children.
[Thoughts of Angel]
Menstruating women give off harmful fumes that will “poison the eyes of children lying in their cradles by a glance.”
[13th century De Secretis Mulierum quoted by Kate Clancey at Context & Variation]
Children conceived by menstruating women “tend to have epilepsy and leprosy because menstrual matter is extremely venemous [sic].
[13th century De Secretis Mulierum quoted by Kate Clancey at Context & Variation]
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.
[Pierre Gallois]