Whenever a gradient is applied to a system, insofar as constraints allow, the gradient is spontaneously degraded as completely as possible. Constraints, of course, are not trivial. In life they entail extremely complex feedback loops as energy is channeled through chemical kinetics….Constraints regulate dynamic processes, but they don’t cause them.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 123)

Far-from-equilibrium systems pay for their reduced entropy by exporting a concomitant increase in entropy into the surrounding environment….All organisms, not just human technological ones, produce waste.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

The real purpose of a [cell] phone, as everyone knows, is texting. Only techno-tards make actual phone calls -- unless they need to lie.

Patricia Marx, The New Yorker of March 10, 2008.

…the very origins of life can be traced to the energy flows of an energetic universe…Deep in the chemical cycles of present-day bacteria are metabolic pathways, chemical traces repeating, with variation, the steps by which matter came to life…paints a picture of energy-rich matter maintaining and making more of itself before genes evolved….The bodies and selves we consider living derive from complex cycles of energy transformation, cycles that only later developed genes….Life displays directional processes such as expansion, increase of taxa, and increased energy use over time that do not square with … random process.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pgs. xii-xiii)

I'm not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.

Greg Bear, Eternity.

No one loves an armed missionary.

Robespierre, as quoted by Colin Jones in the NYRB of December 20, 2007.

Any life that ends in exile cannot have been totally mediocre.

Quoted by Simon Leys in the New York Review of December 20, 2008

Love is not a simple relation to someone else; it is always an attitude, a view of the world, a character trait.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

Some men relate what they think, as what they know.

Though defective in practice, he was religious in principle.

Samuel Johnson, on two separate occasions, to James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

You must provide yourself with a good deal of extraneous matter, which you are to produce occasionally, so as to fill up the time; for you must consider, that they do not listen much. If you begin with the strength of your cause, it may be lost before they begin to listen. When you catch a moment of attention, press the merits of the question upon them."

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson, upon being asked for advice on how to speak to the House of Commons.

The world has few greater pleasures than that which two friends enjoy, in tracing back, at some distant time, those transactions and events through which they have passed together.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Faced with lies
Don't you think that you just lie?

The Secret Machines, Faded Lines

Outsiders find themselves hard pressed to explain the political passions of the Serbs. Having reduced complex political relations to vulgar, petty squabbles, the Serb is not inclined to weigh the contradictions between individual and common interests in the most efficient and just manner. Lust for power, a Byzantine brand of power, in a form limited by no constraints whatsoever, informs the vision of each and every political hack and local government agent as much as it moves the prime minister and leader of the opposition. Politics in Yugoslavia are not conducted for the purpose of achieving some tangible goal...[but] so that the parties can harangue one another to the point of exhaustion, or lunacy.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

Human thinking develops in leaps. Such a leap may germinate for a while in our subconscious, but then it happens in a flash, like an epiphany....Duration is in fact a state of constant flux. There is no spiritual state identical to itself from minute to minute. With each new moment, something has been added to the one before. As he endures, a man is constantly shaping a new self. A person can stop changing only when he stops existing. Though my memory is constantly nudging thoughts, feelings, wishes, from the just abandoned past into the emerging present, I am not aware of this. The changes are too minuscule for my crude perceptive apparatus, and the weight of personal dogma too great to acquiesce without resistance. So it is only when the outcome of the change is noticeable, and when the contradictions inherent to my thinking and behavior have reshaped and reconciled themselves to a new sequence, at last, with some semblance of harmony, that I register the change as a shift from one state of mind to another.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

No man may place his hopes in anyone but God and his own hands.

A Balkan proverb, as quoted in Father and Forefathers by Slobodan Selenic.

Fear always runs the State Department. They always follow what they are most afraid of.

Averell Harriman, as quoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, New York Review of Books of October 11, 2007.

[T]he main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.

Auberon Waugh on his father Evelyn as quoted by John Banville in "The Family Pinfold," New York Review of Books of June 28, 2007

I always fare the best with my innocuousness, which is up to 20 percent conscious. This is easily attained when you're indifferent to the feelings of your dear fellow humans—but you are never as indifferent to them as they deserve.

Albert Einstein as quoted by Lee Smolin in "The Other Einstein" on how he keeps his cool, in the New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007.

The security of a position depends less on the elaborate construction of its approach routes and the depths of the firing trench than on the freshness and undiminished courage of the men defending it.

Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel

...and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway; that true happiness and meaning resided in places we would never find and perhaps did not wish to find.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City

By doing what was necessary to keep the settlers alive, John Smith became the person most feared by investors and bureaucrats through the ages: the man on the scene who does not hesitate to exceed his instructions.

Edmund S. and Marie Morgan, “Our Shaky Beginning’s,” NYRB of April 26, 2007

Our thoughts are just the building material with which we construct a house around ourselves to protect us and separate us from the world. It is unfortunate that they cannot do so, for they are soft and flexible and not intended for this. What the purpose of thought is we have not yet determined.

Milorad Pavic, Unique Item

E-mail isn’t the most self-conscious medium; haste and volume encourage many correspondents to forget themselves. Still, everyone settles on a style. The lower-case non-punctuators, the serial capitalizers, the rhetorical questioners, the subpoena-anticipators, the posterity-watchers: they all have their reasons, and their conceits.

Nick Paumgarten, “Elements of E-Style,” The New Yorker of April 16, 2007

Man is damned, and regrets all the paths he never took.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Governance, as Shakespeare imagines it, is an immense weight whose great emblem is the insomnia that afflicts the competent [and] tough-minded.

Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare & the Uses of Power," New York Review of Books (April 12, 2007)

A man isn’t a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. …Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn’t afraid to make new beginnings.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

We often spin like weathervanes, unsure of our positions, mad with insecurity. We vacillate between despair and the wish for peace and don’t know what is ours. It’s difficult to stop at either end, to embrace only one side, but that’s what we need to do. Any decision, except the one that will disturb our conscience, is better than the sense of disorientation with which indecision bestows us. But the decision shouldn’t be hurried; it should just be helped to develop. When the time comes. Friends can ease the pain of making a decision, but no more.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Life always sinks downward. It takes effort to avoid that. The idea drags it down because it begins to contradict itself. And then a new idea is developed, an opposing one, and it is good until it begins to be turned into reality. What is, is not good; what is good is what is desired. When people come across a pretty thought they should keep it under glass, so it won’t get dirty.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Life is life, one is just like another, everyone seeks happiness, but troubles come on their own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

It is difficult until you make up your mind, all obstacles seem impassable, all difficulties insurmountable. But once you shrug off your indecision, when you defeat your faintheartedness, then unimagined paths open up in front of you, and the world is no longer cramped and threatening. I imagined heroic feats, discovering many an opportunity for genuine courage, prepared tricks that would have deceived even the greatest caution. And I became more excited and agitated as I became more certain, in the depths of my heart and in the remote folds of my brain, that all of this was just empty dreaming…. My hidden instincts, which protected me even without my conscious will, generously granted me such beautiful, noble thoughts, without curtailing them: they knew these thoughts were not dangerous, that they could not turn into deeds.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Human thought is an unsteady wave that is stirred and calmed by the capricious winds of fear or desire.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Everything changes when a man loses his bearings.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

I think it was at this period that my own talk began to upset me. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party I’d gone to against my will. Sometimes I would overhear myself in the act of speech, like a man who suddenly sees himself in a mirror. Then I grew afraid….I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through….Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk….I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Steven Millhauser, History of A Disturbance in the New Yorker of March 5, 2007

I mentioned to him a friend of mine who was formerly gloomy from low spirits, and much distressed by the fear of death, but was now uniformly placid, and contemplated his dissolution without any perturbation. "Sir, (said Johnson,) this is only a disordered imagination taking a different turn."

James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

I began my fickle refutation…with pleasure, realizing maybe for the first time that the heavens and the secrets of the universe, that the secrets of death and existence were the most convenient region into which one could escape from the cares of this world. If they did not exist, one would need to invent them as a refuge.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Nothing would improve if things were different in our lives.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

(Or as Buckeroo Banzai once put it, no matter where you go, there you are.)

I would often say:

Death is a change of state. The soul begins to live by itself. Until it parted from the body, it held with hands, saw with eyes, heard with ears, but it knew the heart of the matter on its own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when they dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it into a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a trough and drive a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the dam, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly--a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud.... What had he done with his life--other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do.

Alan Furst, Dark Star

There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open.

Radionhead, "Pull / Pulk Revolving Doors," Amnesiac

To have defended ourselves when we didn’t need to is one of the first things for which we need to forgive ourselves--as well as others.

Mutual Injury and Mutual Acknowledgement (Lecture in Honor of Andrew Samuels, World in Transition Conference, London, October 2006), Jessica Benjamin.

Instincts are misleading
You shouldn't think what you're feeling
They don't tell you what you know you should want.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Lightness", Transatlanticism

I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made every body quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said. Every body liked him; but he had no friend, as I understand the word, nobody with whom he exchanged intimate thoughts.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

All grief for what cannot in the course of nature be helped, soon wears away; in some sooner, indeed, in some later; but it never continues very long, unless where there is madness.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Some change in the form of life, gives from time to time a new epocha of existence. In a new place there is something new to be done, and a different system of thoughts rises in the mind.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

When you live near a mini-golf course,you know you are too far into suburbia.

Galluchman

He’d never have believed he could become detached so quickly from the ordinary world—after only a few months’ absence. He’d heard about former employees in the Palace of Dreams who had in a manner of speaking withdrawn from life while they were still alive, and who, whenever they found themselves among people they used to know, looked as if they had just come down from the moon.

Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams

For there is no man’s reality around us that someone else is not dreaming about somewhere in this human ocean tonight, nor is there somebody’s dream that is not becoming the reality of another.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

You are like the girl who always rose late; when she married in the next village and for the first time had to rise early, she saw the hoarfrost on the fields and said to her mother-in-law, "We don’t have that in our village!" Like her, you think there is no love in the world, because you have never been awake early enough to encounter it, although every morning it is there on time....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

And then I realized there was no more shutting of your eyes to the truth, no salvation in being blindfolded, no dream and reality, no being awake or asleep. Everything is one and the same continuing eternal day and world, coiling around you like a snake. That is when I saw vast, remote happiness as being small but close; when I perceived the great cause as empty, and the small as my love….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

A person’s acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

One of the sure paths to the real future (because there is also a false future) is to proceed in the direction of your fear.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

He who reaches the end of a road needs it no longer, and the road is not given to him any more.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads....Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. We and our thoughts are like the sea and the stream that runs through it—our body is the current in the sea, but our thoughts are the sea itself. Hence the body makes room for itself in the world by forging through thoughts. And the soul is the seabed of one and the other....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

He could see that all his reflections, forethought and his easy mental reconciliation were not worth much and did not help at the moment when the blow fell. For, it is one thing to project your fears in your imagination, to foresee the worst, to work out your attitude and your defense; and at the same time to feel the satisfaction that all is still in order and in its place. It is quite another to find yourself facing an actual breakdown which demands urgent decisions and concrete actions.

...it was difficult not to think, not to remember, not to see. He had spent twenty-five years looking for "the middle way" which would bring peace of mind and give a person the dignity he could not live without. For twenty-five year he had been moving from one "elation" to another, seeking and finding, losing and gaining, and now he had arrived, exhausted, inwardly rent, worn out, back at the point from which he had set out....This meant that all the paths were only apparently going forward, but were in fact leading in a circle, like the deceptive labyrinths of oriental tales, and so they had brought him, tired and faint-hearted, to this place, among the torn papers and jumbled copies, to the point where the circle began again, as from every other point. This meant there could be no middle path, that true path leading forward, into stability, peace and dignity, but that we weretravelinglling in a circle, always along the same, deceptive path, and only the people and the generations change as they travel, constantly deceived....One just travels. And the road has meaning and dignity only in so far as we are able to find those qualities in ourselves. There is no path or purpose. One just travels. Travels and exhausts oneself.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

The destiny of all these foreigners, cast up and crammed into this narrow, damp valley and condemned to live in unusual conditions for an unknown length of time, now came to an abrupt maturity. The strange circumstances into which they had been thrown speeded up inner processes already at work in them, driving each of them with more relentless force in the direction of his impulses. The way these impulses developed and were manifested here was different in both degree and form than might have been the case in any other circumstances.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

Both the ill-will and the goodness of a people are the product of the circumstances in which they live and develop….I become more and more convinced of how wrong we are…to seek to introduce everywhere our own attitudes, our exclusively rational way of life and government. It seems to me more and more a senseless waste of effort. For it’s pointless to want to remove all abuses and preconceptions if you haven’t the strength or ability to remove what caused them.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

During the day…he was a calm, decisive man, with a definite name, profession and rank, a clear aim and set tasks which were the reason for his coming to this remote Turkish province.…But at night, he was both all that he was now and all that he had ever been or should have been. And that man, lying in the darkness of the long February nights, seemed to…himself a stranger, complex, and at times quite unknown.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

In poetry or politics, a Romantic with a sense of the ridiculous can do great great things.

Adam Gopnik, “Life of the Party: Benjamin Disraeli and the politics of performance,” New Yorker, July 3, 2006

Racin' with the risin' tide to my father's door….
Drownin' in the risin' tide in my father's door….
Racin' from the risin' tide to my father's door….

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB, “Fault Line”, Howl

Hell is Truth Seen Too Late

Thomas Hobbes

"We’re not stupid! We’re just poor! And we have the right to insist on this distinction.”

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

...if possibility of evil be to exclude good, no good ever can be done. If nothing is to be attempted in which there is danger, we must all sink into hopeless inactivity.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

...as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.

Steven Millhauser, "In the Reign of Harad IV," The New Yorker (April 10, 2006)

People incapable of taking pleasure in expressing themselves are not likely to be much good at conversation.

Russell Baker, “Talking It Up,” NYRB (May 11, 2006)

The glove compartment is inaccurately named
And everybody knows it.
So I'm proposing a swift orderly change.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Title and registration"

I walk on water
Every chance I get.

Counting Crows, "Time and Time Again"

The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing … “flow” … “the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities.”

John Lanchester, The New Yorker, February 27, 2006

We boil at different degrees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What seems clear is that the US, which grew more rapidly than other nations for most of its history, came to depend on such growth to solve its social problems in ways other nations did not….If American family incomes do not continue to grow, it may become increasingly difficult to mobilize broad support for a government committed to social equity and public investment.

Jeff Madrick, “The Way to a Fair Deal,” NYRB (January 12, 2006)

In this context, the Director stated that he feels relieved that he is not dismissed for corruption or for not performing of municipal duties but only for construction an individual house at the location for which unfortunately the permits are not issued yet. He also said: "if my house hinders urbanism of the city in any way, I will personally blow it up."

From a dismissed Municipal Director of Inspections in Kosovo to the Municipal Assembly.

I talk in pictures not in words.

Peter Gabriel, ...And Through The Wire.

"I think all of my life and all of everybody's life we have had struggles," he said. "You can act like the storm doesn't exist, you can go through it or you can go above it. I have chosen to ride above the storm, and God will carry me over to the other side."

Former Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry, January 15, 2006 (as quoted in the Washington Post).

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

…such moments of social upset and great inevitable change usually throw up just such men, unbalanced and incomplete, to turn things inside out or lead them astray. That is one of the signs of times of disorder.

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

So, on the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills, generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured “like the bridge on the Drina.”

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

You, children, be zealous for the
beautiful gifts of the
violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.

And my heart is weighed down
and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as
fawns.

I groan for this. But what can I
do?
A human being without old age is
Not a possibility.

There is the story of Tithonos,
loved by Dawn with her arms
of roses
and she carried him off to the
ends of the earth

when he was beautiful and young.
Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his
deathless wife.

Sappho, Fragment 58, translated by Anne Carson (NYRB, October 20, 2005)

I am nothing by myself. I am something only when mixed with others.

A principle of science recently rediscovered.

What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely.

Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker of September 26, 2005.

You must always be careful in the jungle. I listen to my dreams. If I have a dream of danger, then I stay in the village. Many accidents happen to white people because they don’t believe their dreams.

Vajuvi, of the Kalapalo people of the Brazilian Amazon as quoted in the New Yorker of September 19, 2005.

God has given me this swan song to see if I am - to see if I am up to it.

Dr. Minyard, elected coroner of Orleans Parish.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils...

Rebecca West, speaking of Europe in 1937 (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

We prune our minds to fit them into the garden of ordinary life. We exclude from our consciousness all sorts of knowledge that we have acquired because it might distract us from the problems we must solve if we are to go on living, and it might even make us doubt whether it is prudent to live. But sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as time, and we must lift this ban. Then we must let our full knowledge invade our minds, and let our memories of birth crawl like serpents from their cave and our foreknowledge of death spread its wide shadow.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

The woman a man loves is in a sense his soul, or at any rate the answer to the call it makes.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

All women believe that some day something supremely agreeable will happen, and that afterwards the whole of life will be supremely agreeable. All men believe that some day they will do something supremely disagreeable, and that afterwards life will move on so exalted a plane that all considerations of the agreeable and disagreeable will prove petty and superfluous.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is not pleasant to admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the obligation to go on learning even though it involves making acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[W}e live in an uncomprehended universe, and...it is urgently necessary for sensitive men to look at each phenomenon in turn and find out what it is and what are its relations to the rest of existence. (Dubrovnik II)

He offered himself wholly to each event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had to make about the nature of the universe. (Sarajevo VII)

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

You think you'll never get it right,
But you know that you might.

Misheard somewhere.

Carelessness and cruelty ... infects any power when it governs a people not its own without safeguarding itself by giving the subjects the largest possible amount of autonomy.

It seem very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[Mussolini's] offence is that he made himself dictator without binding himself by any of the contractual obligations which civilized man has imposed on his rulers in all creditable phases of history and which give power a soul to be saved.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, "Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone."

Rebecca West speaking about Emperor Franz Josef in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

....

[A} cynic [is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And a sentimentalist…is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

Oscar Wilde, Act III, Lady Windermere’s Fan

The Balkans create more history than they can consume locally.

Saki (HH Munro) as quoted by Lord Burnham

[F]or general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to.


Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car is or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns.

We don't know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why.

Stevan Harnad, "Letters: What is Consciousness?" in the June 23, 2005 NYRB.

[T]rue politeness is a moral quality, whereby the self is abnegated (concealed, Pascal would have said) in order to further the happiness of the group.

Peter France, "The Pleasure of Their Company," in the June 23, 2005 NYRB.