Category Archives: quotes

food+drink, memes, music, personal, quotes, science

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.

  1. Something I Like: Tea
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Halloween
  3. Something I Want To Do: Fly on Flightdeck of an Airliner
  4. A Blog I Like: Bad Science
  5. 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
  6. Some Music I Like: Moody Blues, Octave
  7. A Food I Like: Swiss Chard
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Milk
  9. A Word I Like: Persiflage
  10. 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]
amusements, books, current affairs, memes, pleasures, quotes

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.

books, memes, quotes

Quotes of the Week

1 Comment

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]

beliefs, books, quotes, thoughts

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]

memes, quotes, thoughts

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.

beliefs, people, quotes, sexuality

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]

food+drink, memes, personal, quotes

Ten Things – September

Number 9 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.

  1. Something I Like: Photography
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Take any more exams
  3. Something I Want To Do: Get Rid of my Depression
  4. A Blog I Like: The Loom
  5. A Book I Like: Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cookery
  6. Some Music I Like: Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly
  7. A Food I Like: Chips
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Marron Glacé
  9. A Word I Like: Verisimilitude
  10. A Quote I Like: Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico. [Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles]
current affairs, quotes

Quotes of the Week

Not a lot in the way of quotes this week, although those that follow are relatively chunky, as we’ve spent 4 days over the weekend running an international literary conference (more of which anon, I hope).

I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention – himself – has been his only interesting role.
[Matthew Parris, The Times, March 2006; quoted in Oliver James, Affluenza]

Tea Pigs uses only whole leaf teas, whole herbs, whole berries and whole flowers. No dust in sight. Served in biodegradable tea temples.
[https://www.teapigs.co.uk/]

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
[William Blake, Politicians and Politics]

So there you are … politics diluted with tea. What could be more British?!

amusements, arts, beliefs, medical, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]

The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]

Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]

When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]