Six core practices to jump-start a meaningful life: Say Yes, Trust Yourself, Slow Down, Be Generous, Speak Up and Love More.
Category Archives: quotes
Quotes of the Week
A better selection of quotes this week, which reflects a more varied weeks reading.
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
[Steve Eley]
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
[Psychologist BF Skinner]
We all are born mad. Some remain so.
[Samuel Beckett]
Physicists. Just because you’re not smart enough to know what the fuck they’re talking about doesn’t mean God exists.
[]
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
[Stephen Roberts]
Children are naïve – they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you’re asking for trouble.
[Frank Zappa]
Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality.
[Frank Zappa; Statement to the Senate Hearing on “Porn Rock”; 1985]
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
[Isaac Newton]
You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
[Frank Zappa]
Just as long as that giraffe is made of choux pastry and dipped in chocolate! Might be best if it doesn’t mate with a pink unicorn too. 🙂
Quotes of the Week
Slightly thin pickings this week as I’ve been flattened by some nasty flu-cum-bronchitis-bug-thingy all week which has precluded almost everything except lying in bed being date expired.
In the past, when marriage was a more pragmatic institution, love was optional. Respect was essential. Men and women found emotional connection elsewhere, primarily in same-sex relationships. Men bonded over work and recreation; women connected through child rearing and borrowing sugar.
Esther Perel; Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss]
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]
We still live in a world where progress only happens with funerals.
[Violet Blue]
Every law is an infraction of liberty.
[Jeremy Bentham]
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
[Rita Rudner]
Facts of the Week
This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series highlighting unexpected, unusual or just amazing facts I come across. It is really for curiosity value rather than a resource of those who take part in pub quizzes. Wherever possible I will, as always, provide a source for the information. So here is the first selection of factlets …
Each year, an estimated 10,000 shipping containers fall off container ships at sea.
Between five and six million containers are in transit at any given moment.
[]
The Sendai earthquake shifted the earth’s figure axis by about 17 cm and moved the main island of Japan [Honshu] around 2.4 metres.
[US Geological Survey]
The Sendai earthquake also shortened our day by about 1.8 milliseconds (thousands of a second).
[NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]
The original Polynesian and South Pacific origin of the word ‘tabu’ actually refers to that which is sacred: the application of a taboo actually designating that which is holy.
[OED]
Quotes of the Week
A good selection of amusements amongst this week’s quotes …
The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
[William Gibson]
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
[Thomas Jefferson]
Society places a great deal of importance upon “being concerned” about this, that or the other terrible thing going on somewhere in the world. I agree that a bit of this concern is useful in helping alleviate suffering in those places. But it strikes me that the vast majority of what we call “being concerned” involves getting into our own heads, turning over the information, imagining whatever we want to imagine, working up our emotions, wallowing in our feelings like a pig in mud. For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend very clearly this makes us look good socially, like we’re doing the right thing. But I’m unable to see how watching endless reports […] about a disaster really helps anything.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/]
You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
[George Mikes, How to be Decadent]
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
[Jeff Valdez]
Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise. But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease.
[Brad Warner on the Sendai Earthquake at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake.html]
Every mountain; every rock on this planet; every living thing; every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space.
[Prof. Brian Cox; Wonders of the Universe; BBC2 TV, 13 March 2011]
I hear the argument, and it is an ingenious argument only a lawyer of his brilliance could make …
[David Cameron replying in House of Commons to Sir Malcolm Rifkind]
Never play with a dead cat and above all never make friends with a monkey.
[Osbert Sitwell, quoting his father in Tales My Father Taught Me. Thanks to Katyboo for this one.]
The natural world is a living erotic museum filled with variations in male genitalia, illustrating how natural selection has paid nearly as much attention to the male member as Catholic priests have.
[http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/]
To you , I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
[Woody Allen]
“Are there circumstances in which the government might …?”
“Well there could be circumstances. To answer your question in any other way would preclude all possibilities.”
[William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, answering a question from the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee; 16/03/2011]
You Just Can't Get the Staff
Yesterday we received a communication from the Civil Service Club in London. In this they advertise their Annual Dinner as follows …
Three course dinner with Champagne reception & Canopies, with the Committees guest speaker.
How many committees? And whose marquees?
Quote: Research
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
[Marston Bates]
Marriage Quotes
Yesterday I came across these Marriage Quotes from Kids. As always there’s more than a grain of truth in them!
Question: How can a stranger tell if two people are married?
You might have to guess based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids.
[Derrick, age 8]
Question: What do most people do on a date?
Dates are for having fun, and people should use them to get to know each other. Even boys have something to say if you listen long enough.
[Lynnette, age 8]
Question: Is it better to be single or married?
It’s better for girls to be single but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them.
[Anita, age 9 ]
Quotes of the Week
Another weekly selection of esoterica …
Anyone who tells you that your body is anything other than the beautiful, glorious MIRACLE that it is is, as they say in “Princess Bride”, probably selling something.
[Emily Nagoski at ]
[E]ach of us has the job of finding the beliefs we’re not interested in carrying with us any more, uprooting them, and finding something new and healthier to take their place. This process is neither easy nor painless. But it is a path to the confidence and joy I advocate everyone bring to bed with them every night.
[Emily Nagoski at ]
Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling busybody, for ever trotting about on the pavement looking for a new bun shop.
[Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation, 1894]
Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more.
[Alex Comfort]
The debate [in 1907 American Medicine about the weight of the soul] went on from the May issue all the way through December, whereupon I lost the thread, my eye having strayed across the page to “A Few Points in the Ancient History of Medicine and Surgery,” by Harry H Grigg, MD. It is with thanks to Harry H Grigg that I can now hold forth at cocktail parties on the history of haemorrhoids, gonorrhoea, circumcision, and the speculum.
[Mary Roach; Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers]
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
[Henry Miller]
A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.
[Victor Lownes]
We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca’ … There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory … Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.
[Thomas Edison; Diaries]
Quotes of the Week
This week’s selection of the good, the bad and the ugly …
Relationships are like a card game where you start with two hearts and a diamond, but end up needing a club and spade.
[Tony Green on Facebook]
Every concept the mind can create includes its opposite. No thought is ultimate because each idea depends on every other idea it might possibly contrast with for its apparent self existence. Our own existence as individuals is dependent upon all of creation. This does not negate our individual existence. It is an attempt to see our individual existence in a different light.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com]
When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?
[Montaigne]
Urethane treatment is standard on all products (with exceptions)
[Amtico Flooring Brochure]
Comedians really aren’t that different from scientists. They look at the world and question why things are as they are and try to find an answer. It’s just that scientists do it with far more rigour and the possibility that humanity will be much improved by their discoveries. Perhaps comedians are just lazy scientists. Very, very lazy, stupid scientists.
[Robin Ince, The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]
And finally, dreadful joke of the week …
Why did the scarecrow win a Nobel prize?
Because he was out standing in his field.
[The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]
Bring back Basil Brush, all is forgiven!