Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2024

Love is what you've been through with somebody.


James Thurber

Sunday, October 01, 2023

Truer words ....

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

Dead men don’t find things out. 

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

 

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Rules

That’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Wednesday, August 02, 2023

You cannot make Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.

G.K. Chesterton, in the The Paradise of Thieves (A Father Brown mystery)

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

 

G.K. Chesterton, in the The Blue Cross  (A Father Brown mystery) as attributed to "Poe."

Sunday, May 07, 2023

È sempre bene
Il sospettare un poco in questo mondo.

 

Mozart, Cosi fan tutte

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Here in no alien place he sat....

P. D. James, The Private Patient

 

Monday, December 26, 2022

He took comfort in knowing that the world would carry on without him-and, in fact, already had.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Friday, December 23, 2022

It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

A man -- a viewing-point man -- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness: Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.

 John SteinbeckThe Log from the Sea of Cortez

Monday, November 21, 2022

Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species…. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

John SteinbeckThe Log from the Sea of Cortez

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Facts are like cows, if you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Bunter’s mother in Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
 

Friday, July 15, 2022

Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

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

 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell



Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Eloquence and erudition were the twin prerequisites of greatness ... any effort expended in the cultivation of such gifts would surely be rewarded, if not in this world then in the world to come.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR

Friday, June 03, 2022

All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. 

Greg Bear,  Legacy

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Someone else’s fool is a joke, your own fool a calamity.

A folk proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn.

Wednesday, February 09, 2022

From a wonderful and beautiful book

Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

 


Wednesday, November 24, 2021

What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

Monday, October 04, 2021

Patience under duress is rarely appreciated by the politically immature.

Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings

Wednesday, September 08, 2021

Boy, you got me confused with a man who repeats himself.

Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), The Wire