QUOTES IN ENGLISH
(or, if in other languages, in Italic script)
Student: Professor, why is there something rather than nothing?
Professor: (wearily) Even if there WAS nothing, you still wouldn’t be happy
Told as a first-person story in a TED talk, but I can’t remember which
There’s a lot more good music to be written in C major
- Schönberg
I hate the word (Spirituality). I despise it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns
- Matt Dilahunty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb23xelI89Q – 5’45”
The demon of comparison is a very pretty demon but one of the most contagious. He does not attach himself to the strong – there is not much to be gained from them; but he likes to seduce the little ones. And his seductions are, for the little and weak ones, irresistible.
Feodor Sologub – In Bondage, first page
What kind of mind would do something as useless as inventing ghosts and bribing them for good weather?
- Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Chapter, 8, ‘The Meaning of Life’ P. 556
There are people so poor they only have money
- César Calvo
Forgetting history, or even getting it wrong, is one of the key elements of building a nation
- Ernest Renan, quoted in ‘The Edge of the World’ by Michael Pye, P.19
If anyone loudly blesses their neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse.
Proverbs, 27:14
"We're all looking for that one very very special person who can spare us the need to mix with everybody else" - Alain De Botton
(when challenged by Stephen Colbert to explain 'why there is something rather than nothing in fewer than ten words') –
'Words that make questions may not be questions at all'
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
An economics degree is a nine thousand dollar lobotomy
Quoted by economist Prof Steve Keen
A person is a person because of people
- Zulu proverb
Minus times minus equals plus
The reason why, we won't discuss
- Hilaire Belloc
"Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"If the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
- Terence McKenna
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of human freedoms – to choose one's attitude to any given set of circumstances
- Victor Frankl; From Death Camp to Existentialism, quoted in To Live Outside the Law, by Leaf Fielding, Ch 14, P. 200
A bad writer can become a good critic in the same way that an awful wine could make a good vinegar
- Francois Mauriac
The present contain all that there is; it is holy ground, for it is the past, and it is the future
- Alfred North Whitehead – Aims of Education, P.3, quoted in Fifty Major Thinkers on Education (Ed JA Palmer), P. 201
"We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness of women is grater than all the other wickednesses of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed, for the safety of our bodies and goods that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals"
- 12th Century Premonstratensian Abbot, quoted in 'The Perfect Heresy' by Stephen O'Shea, in Notes to Ch 3, P.40 (on P278)
Monotheism has an appealing philosophical neatness, but it leads... apparently... to clitorectomy, so you want to watch that one.
Terence McKenna - http://youtu.be/amUjyRM6bQo
You lean over my meaning's edge and feel
A dizziness of the things I have not said
- Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904)
"Twitter: the seething collective id"
- Suffolk Blue on Chelsea Chat forum, 2015-02-18
You can have all the bananas and water you want, but it means nothing if you've no one to share them with
- Count Arthur Strong (Steve Delaney - BBC episode broadcast 2015-02.17)
To the question: How Offended Are You? –
Never. In my life everything is no problem at all. If something offebnd me it teach me something and give me more power
- London Sikh interviewed for Scene and Heard by DZ Greene, Private Eye, 1385, P.17
Understanding is the apperception of patterns as such
- Alfred North Whitehead
It would be terrible for an actor to act the same way all the time. That's what they call a 'star'.
- Alan Watts – Stop Competing With Yourself
More money has been spent trying to find something wrong with cannabis than any other vegetable material in human history, and what they have come up with is so pathetically thin that I am confident that it amounts to a clean bill of health for this stuff.
Terence McKenna - http://youtu.be/Z4jo0ofs5g4
I mix three kraters only for those who are wise:
One is for good health, which they drink first.
The second is for love and pleasure. The third is for sleep,
And when they have drunk it, those who are wise wander homewards
The fourth is no longer ours but belongs to arrogance. The fifth leads
to shouting. The sixth to a drunken revel. The seventh to black eyes.
The eighth to a summons. The ninth to bile. The tenth to madness,
in that it makes people throw things.
(advice on hom many bowls of wine ('kraters') to drink from;
Eubulus, Semele or Dionysius (Fragment 93)
These days you don't teach philosophy, you perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have his own chat show.
Timothy Leary
Thoughts run deeper than language
Noam Chomsky
I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong – neither yet bread to the wise or riches to the men of understanding; nor yet favour to men of skill. But time and chance happeneth to them all
Ecclesiastes 9:11
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord James dead' to people who never knew Lord James was alive
GK Chesterton
Who ever knew a tall man that was clever, a red-head that was faithful or a short man that was humble?
- Medieval English proverb
"My mother, from an early age, taught me that mourning is a two-year process at the least, that if it's done properly then you come out of that and you can pick up your life again"
- David Sherlock (on his partner Graham Chapman's death from cancer) quoted in Monty Python Autobiography, Ch 6, P.314.
"The wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute civilization"
- Wallace (quoted in The Faber Book of Exploration, intro to Part 5, P.575)
In my second year I quit working on the Chevrolet line. I worked nights and I said fuck this, I am never going to work for money ever again in my life. So I quit and I got a job in a children's theatre where I made sets, and painted myself green and played the ogre.
("En mi segundo año dejé de trabajar en la fábrica de Chevrolet. Trabajab de noche y me sije, que se joda esto, nunca voy a trabajar a cambio de dinero jamás en mi vida. Así que lo dejé, me apunté a un grupo de teatro para niños y hice los decorados, y me pinté de verde para hacer de ogro!)
- Terry Gilliam (Monty Python)
"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink."
- J.B. Priestley.
"Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from want of this recognition come half of our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tete-a-tete for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married. (Women are not so affected since they can usually be alone in their houses for most of the day if they wish.) Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us"
- Freya Stark – The Valley of the Assassins, 1934 (quoted in The Faber Book of Exploration, Part 3, P.401)
"I climbed to the summit of the dune and lay peacefully in the sun, four hundred feet above the well. A craving for privacy is something which Bedu (the Bedouins) will never understand; something which they will always instinctively mistrust"
- Wilfred Thesiger (quoted in The Faber Book of Exploration, Part 3, P.203)
"They asking me of our custom, I said 'You are ground-sitters, but we sit high upon stools like the Turk'- - The legs of chair-sitters to hang all day they thought an insufferable fatigue".
Charles Montagu Doughty; Arabia Felix – Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia, 1932 (quoted in The Faber Book of Exploration, Part 3, P.363)
No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful
- Tom Stoppard (in 'Jumpers'?)
Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at ourselves by night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides and a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from plankton in the water. The world was simple, stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also – indeed, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and all that mattered were the same to-day as they had always been and would always be; up in the absolute common measure of history, endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.
- Thor Heyerdahl quoted in The Faber Book of Exploration, Chapter 1, P.105
You can't use up creativity; the more you use, the more you have
- Maya Angelou
I don’t like it and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it
- Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Mechanics
I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame somebody for all this
- Mark O'Brien (Believing Catholic, crippled by polio from the neck down, d. aged 49)
"One of the doctor's first duties is to educate the masses not to take medicine"
Sir William Osler
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
- Martin Luther King (Thought for the Day, BBC Radio 4, 27.03.14)
"We used to argue theology a lot. It's a great one for kids. You don't need any facts".
- Stephen Hawking's sister on their mutual childhood in the Bio-documentary 'Hawking'
We take slave drugs to make us work a lot and think little. An Irish coffee and a short. The perfect combination for slaves.
- Joseph M Fericgla
During an interview with Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors, Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman said, "Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it."
From 'Leaf Science', 2014.01.08
On contemporary pop. "The successful artists are completely narcissistic and self-referential. Every song is about them. They talk about themselves. They talk about what they have. They talk about what they're going to do to somebody else. They talk about what they're going to get. They talk about how much money they have... They're not telling you anything, there is no spirituality, there is no idea or concept."
– Bob Casale of Devo (from obituary in The Guardian, Feb 19, 2014)
"Success is buried in the garden of failure"
- Unknown quoted by Graham Linehan in Chain reaction, BBC Radio 4, Jan 2014
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so" - Mark Twain
"Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults."
― Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
~Frank Zappa
"Obedience is the knife that guts the will of man" - Joseph of Cupertino
89% of the world's peoples take very strong psychoactive substances, and in the other 11%, here we are in the West
- Joseph M Fericgla
Anyone who distinguishes between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either
- Marshall McLuhan
A Roman would lose a friend rather than give up the chance of making a good joke
- Quintilian (???)
"Se non è vero, è ben trovato"
- Italian proverb
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones"
- John Cage in an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, 1988
Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills
- Schopenhauer
Every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic deeds; every solicitor carries inside him the ruins of a poet.
- Gustave Flaubert; Madame Bovary
If it's poetry, it's absolutely rubbish, my dear. Consider yourself, have you ever met a person who started talking in rhyme? And if we all started talking in rhyme, even at the order of the authorities, how much do you think we should say? Poetry's of no use, my dear.
Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Every cliché about India is true. So is the opposite.
- Manmohan Singh
"We perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soul-less bodies and bodiless souls" – Paul Bloom in The Atlantic magazine, 2005.
(This may) make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as they die
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow – Chapter 6, P. 77 (Norms, Surprises and Causes)
A single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries but a cherry will do nothing for a bowl of cockroaches
- Paul Rozin, quoted in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – Chapter 28 (Bad Events), P. 302
Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not their feelings
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow – Chapter 36 (Life as a Story), P. 387
The biggest surprise was the emotional experience of time spent wth one's children which, for American women, was slightly less enjoyable than doing housework
Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow– Chapter 28 (Bad Events), P. 295
Call no man happy until he is dead
Aristotle – or Herodotus... or Solon ??? (Or Aeschylus or Sophocles)
Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of a remembering self
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow – Chapter 35 (Two Selves), P. 381
Hence, too, doubtless, is derived the scanty salary of teachers, who are to feel themselves repaid by the sacredness of their calling alone and to "renounce" all other enjoyments
- Max Stirner: Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum – (in 1846!!)
There is something terrible in the sacred love of country
- Leon de St Just
Happiness is having a family that is well-knit, generous, and in another country
- George Burns
He (Captain Percival) then took a bible and read something concerning David and Solomon – and observed that David was a bad man – he murdered many people, etc., but Solomon was a good man – he had a thousand wives. That was right. There was no harm in having many wives, and why did the chiefs speak of marriage? Solomon was not married, etc.
Hannah Holmes said to me a short time since that Captain Percival endeavoured to get here sister to live with him. He said he was married to a wife in America, but when he took a journey inland, he had another wife there. When he went to France, he had another there, and it would be good to have another – even herself – here.
Mutiny on the Globe; Thomas Ferrel Hefferman, Afterword, P. 200
It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine
- P G Wodehouse
The nightingale has a lyre of gold
The lark's is a clarion call
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute
But I love him best of all
Hindley, quoted in 'A Georgian Love Story' by Ernest Raymond
In the various situations I've found myself in, some have been marked by such a feeling of well-being that when I remember them I am affected as if I were still there. Not only do I recall the times, the places, and the people, but all the surrounding objects as well, the temperature of the air, its scent, its color, a certain local impression that can be felt only there, and the vivid memory of it carries me there all over again
Jean Jacques Rousseau; Confessions, quoted in Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch, Chapter 4, P.82
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
From Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Fitzwilliam lads had been unimpressed with the veganism of some of the Sheffield Class Warriors and decided to see if they were 'up for it'. One night coming back from the pub, they dressed up in stolen cop helmets and riot shields and stormed into the house the Sheffield mob were staying in. Armed with a vegetarian diet and baseball bats the Sheffield mob battered the fuck out of the first two 'cops' through the door. 'Fair do', they groaned, and the vegan 'weaklings' were well trusted from then on.
In reverse, Bristol Class War told us that a trip to South Wales by some Bristol anarchists had resulted in a withdrawal of support for the miners 'because they ate meat'.
Ian Bone; Bash the Rich, Chapter 25, Pp 213-214
The Goths in Ravenna knew how to shape sunlight
- Waldemar Januszczek, article on the Dark Ages in the Sunday Times, 25.11.12
Nationalism is the strange belief that one country is better than another because you happen to have been born there
- G B Shaw
No one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public
- ?? possibly the same source as the following:
It is a sad day for capitalism when you can not fire dwarves out of cannons in central park
- P T Barnum
As we walked out on the street, Yan said she could have made a fool of that waitress but thought she was pitiful. Unhappy people are dangerous, she said.
- Anchee Min – Red Azalea, Part 3 (P 205)
In 1965, Bukowski told fellow poet William Wantling: 'I only loved one woman and, unlike all the others, she was the only one who never demanded or asked for the spoken word of it. And even over her grave I said nothing, not even in my head. But the sunlight knew, and my shoelaces, and (illegible)'
From Barry Miles' biography – Charles Bukowski. Chapter 4 ('Crinking With Jane') P. 115
"Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others."
- Ambrose Bierce – From 'The Devil's Dictionary'
There is no one else like Pere Ubu. I went to a lecture by Brian Eno in the early 80's and someone asked him what he thought of Pere Ubu. Eno replied, "Someone has to do the dirty work". I love that
Posted by Moonlight 6654 on thread under Youtube vid of The Birdies are Singing
You did not eat all day. Are you all right? The Supervisor's voice rose in the corner. You only have one stomach – can you afford to abuse it? I said, I am afraid that I'm not feeling too well. He said, don't break your nerves, because it would not be worth it; no one really cares about what happens to you. Being egotistical is not a good idea. You can eat yourself up that way. He stood up and walked out the door.
- Anchee Min – Red Azalea, Part 3 (P 241)
All immature people assign blame
- Germaine Greer
Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire
- GB Shaw
It always happens... the best performances are before the smallest audiences
- John Adams (on Youtube video of his violin concerto in 2001)
Critic to Sun Ra – My 8-year old daughter could have played that
Sun Ra´s response – Yea, but could she have written it?
It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice
- Chinese proverb
Creation is one hell of a marvelous miracle, as long as it lasts
- From "Charles Bukowski", by Barry Miles; Chapter 11, The Old Man and His Cats, P. 289
(when challenged by Stephen Colbert to explain ‘why there is something rather than nothing in fewer than ten words’) –
‘Words that make questions may not be questions at all’
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
An economics degree is a nine thousand dollar lobotomy
Quoted by economist Prof Steve Keen
A person is a person because of people
- Zulu proverb
Minus times minus equals plus
The reason why, we won’t discuss
- Hilaire Belloc
"Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"If the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
- Terence McKenna
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude to any given set of circumstances
- Victor Frankl; From Death Camp to Existentialism, quoted in To Live Outside the Law, by Leaf Fielding, Ch 14, P. 200