Quote of the day

Some Robert Benchley quotes

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.

...without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.
 
''Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.''

— Martha C. Nussbaum
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“Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.”
― Luther Burbank

“It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. ”
― Luther Burbank
 
To perceive is to suffer.
-Aristotle

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone,
ask yourself the following question: what fault of mine
most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?
-Marcus Aurelius

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself,
become the wounded person.
-Walt Whitman
 
3 Willem de Kooning quotes

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts
order into it is a very absurd point of view.

The artist fills space with an attitude.

Art should not have to be a certain way.
 
Questionable advice

Claim everything, concede nothing, and if defeated,
allege fraud.
-Tammany Hall political maxim.

If everyone dropped out of school, we'd have a much
more intelligent society.
-Jaden Smith

If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for.
W C Fields

If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.
Harry S Truman

An affair now and the is good for a marriage.
-Bette Davis

You have to be a b@$t@rd to make it--and that's a fact.
John Lennon
 
Just the other day I started reading something (a book) by Hannah Arendt-
The origins of Totalitarianism. Some of the ideas reminded me of Erich Fromm's
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Both are worth reading.
Here are some (various) quotes from Arendt.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt
 
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Kurt Friedrich Gödel

The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever
understand each other at all.

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite
of a great truth is another truth.

All generalizations- perhaps except this one- are false.
 
Oscar Wilde quotes.
Some of these may have been posted before, but they’re far too good for anyone to complain about.

  • Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
  • To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
  • Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
  • I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
  • We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
  • If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
  • It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
  • The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
  • The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
  • You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
  • Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
  • Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.
  • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
  • You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
  • A good friend will always stab you in the front.
  • Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
  • I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
  • Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
  • Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
  • Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
  • I am not young enough to know everything.
  • A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
  • Hearts are made to be broken.
  • You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
  • Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
  • The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
  • Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
  • Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
  • I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
 
Somewhere, recently I came across a quote from Elon Musk- "The fundamental
weakness of western civilization is empathy".

For various reasons this quote sounded a bit "off"- Why is empathy just a problem in
western civilization? The West is known for capitalism, laissez-faire, corporate
greed, and huge differences between the ultra rich and the very poor.
So, I don't quite get it- does Musk feel that empathy would impinge on his greed?
well, anyway, I tried to find some other quotes about empathy...

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything.
And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn
to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty
enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
― Andrew Boyd

“Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is
not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the
empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled.
There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a 'hot mess'
or having 'too many issues' are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring,
humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves,
our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others,
our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we
increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.”
― Daniel Goleman

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.
-Hannah Arendt
 
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Edna St. Vincent Millay quotes.

Into the darkness they go, the
wise and lovely.

I'm glad that I paid so little attention to good advice;
had I abided by it I might have been saved from some
of my most valuable mistakes.

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age. The child is
grown and puts away childish things. Childhood is the
kingdom where nobody dies.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; It's
one damn thing over and over.

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling,
it's only that.
 
Architect quotes
Note: these are not great quotes- probably why they are architects, not writers.

The mind is like an umbrella. It's most useful when its open.
-Walter Gropius

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
-Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Space and light and order. Those are the things men need
just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep
-Le Corbusier

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one
which makes the landscape more beautiful than before the
building was built.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.
I. M. Pei

Form ever follows function.
-Louis Sullivan

People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship.
-Buckminster Fuller
 
A few from Heraclitus
(copied from Goodreads)
  • "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
  • "Nothing endures but change."
  • "Change alone is unchanging."
  • "The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts."
  • "Character is destiny."
  • "Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive."
  • "Much learning does not teach understanding."
  • "Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."
  • "Nature loves to hide."

  • "The road up and the road down are one and the same."
  • "It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest."
  • "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony."
 
'' [ . . . ] all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.''

— Ralph Waldo Emerson [1844], The Poet, in Essays: Second Series
 
Julio Cortazar (2)

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which
repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing, itself, into
the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...
 
Erich Fromm
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel,
who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the
suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly,
a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely,
powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions,
if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and
clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from
neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather
than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a
sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater
independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
 
Svetlana Alexievich- author of Voices from Chernobyl
“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone -
the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

“I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.”

“Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.”
 
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''[ . . . ] modernism has provided the automoble of literature with a fifth gear, but [ . . . ] post-modernism also likes to get out the old road maps. In this sense, W.H. Auden is [ . . . ] our first post-modernist poet.''

— John Fuller, British poet and critic, 2000
 

The Two-headed Calf​

By Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.
 
Cyril Connolly-

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament,
and embrace it with passion.

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in
disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
(Bagumbawalla can relate to this one)

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones
who will be writing about you.
 
William Blake

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

I care not whether a man is good or evil:
all that I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool.
Go! put off holiness and put on intellect.

If the door of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite.

Exuberance is beauty.

Man's desires are limited by his
perceptions; none can desire what
he has not perceived.
 
''We live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we become very cost conscious.''

— Andrew Bacevich [as cited in Boston University, 2014, paragraph 5]
 
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Arthur Schopenhauer quotes

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of
a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing
his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character.

Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar
alive today so that he cam starve again tomorrow.
 
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Nathalie Sarraute (author of Tropisms)
“She went from room to room, nosed about in the kitchen, banged furiously on the door of the bathroom which someone was occupying, and she wanted to break in, to manage, to give them a shaking, to ask them if they were going to stay in there for an hour, or remind them that it was late, that they were going to miss the car or the train, it was too late, that they had already missed something because of their carelessness, their negligence, or that their breakfast was ready, that it was cold, that it had been waiting for two hours, that it was stone-cold . . . And it seemed that from her viewpoint there was nothing uglier, more contemptible, more stupid, more hateful, that there was no more obvious sign of inferiority, of weakness, than to let one’s breakfast grow cold, than to come late for breakfast.”
― Nathalie Sarraute

“What I tried to do was to show certain inner “movements” by which I had long been attracted; in fact, I might even say that, ever since I was a child, these movements, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives, had struck and held my attention.”
― Nathalie Sarraute
 
Pablo Neruda quotes

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

You can cut all the flowers but you
cannot keep the Spring from coming.

If nothing saves us from death, at least
love saves us from life.
 
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Some from Ida Tarbell (Journalist muckraker)

  • "There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness."
On Truth and Progress
  • "Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain."
  • "I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done..."
  • "A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it."
On Society and Self-Improvement
  • "I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws."
  • "Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world."
On Life and Other Subjects
  • "In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing."
  • "I have often found it difficult to explain myself to myself, and I do not often try."
  • "Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States."
 
Some quotations about Capitalism

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word,
that is a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.
-Lenin

Property is organized robbery.
-G B Shaw

The public be damned, I'm working for my stockholders.
-W H Vanderbilt

I have gone to war too... I am going to fight capitalism even if kills me.
It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed
while all around you people are starving.
-Sylvia Pankhurst

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily
due to the capitalist mode of production.
-Herbert Marcuse

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, Communism is the
complete opposite.
-Anonymous
 
Some by Eric Satie


“I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.”

“When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.”

“I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so."

“Everybody offers to buy one a drink; but nobody ever dreams of buying one a sandwich.”

“I am tired of always dying with a broken heart.”

“I have never written a note I didn't mean.”

“Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.”
 
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