Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward.

Tim Parks, The New Yorker (Reverend)

The smartphone-bearing zombies plodding blindly down our sidewalks still inhabit the real world even if their souls have gone elsewhere.

James Gleick, The New York Review of Dec. 18, 2014.

When did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.

When you don't know where you're going, any road can get you lost.


A riff on Lewis Carroll

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

The entitlement to believe what on careful reflection seems to be the case, where there is no reason to doubt it, is the necessary condition for being able to form any justified beliefs at all. ... The only way to pursue the truth is to consider what seems true, after careful reflection of a kind appropriate to the subject matter, in light of all the relevant data, principles, and circumstances.


Thomas Nagel, Listening to Reason (New York Review, October 9, 2014)

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Review.  

What we look for does not happen;
what we least expect is fashioned by the gods.


Euripides, Bacchae (as quoted from Robin Robertson in the Sept. 25, 2014 New York Review)