He took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him. ... His relationship to his fellow human beings was governed by the same unconscious assumption; being unable to detect mutability where there plainly wasn't any, he made like the raindrop relinquishing hold of the cloud which contained it.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Nobody with four Aces wants a New Deal.

From Davos 2012 by way of The New Yorker of March 5, 2012

If I acted, then the faith would surely follow.  After that, I would believe because I had acted.

John le Carre, Absolute Friends

How could anybody, let alone a man like me, expect to blend in in a land where the people are so very, very small.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Los Gigante" in The New Yorker of February 6, 2012.

Most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

They were people who had no doubt whatsoever that the more narrow-minded they became, the closer they got to heaven.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Nobody's easier to fool than the person who is convinced that he is right.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

He knew that bad premonitions have a far higher accuracy rate than good ones.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.


William Shakespeare (The Tempest) as quoted by
Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
   'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
   Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 62

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?
Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too. 

William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act 2, Scene 2

Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious!  Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.

Wiliam James, as quoted by Geoffrey O'Brien in The New York Review of July 14, 2011

Ingrate, he had of me all he could have;
I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood,
Though free to fall.

Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III.

Life [has become] that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash.

Douglas Coupland, as quoted by Pico Iyer in "The McLuhan Galaxy", New York Review of Books (May 26, 2011)

True ambivalence: not feeling unsure, but feeling opposing extremes of conviction at once....ambivalence holds more information than any single emotion.

Rivka Galchen, "Dream Machine" The New Yorker (May 2, 2011)

In attitude and proportion the graceful majesty of the figure is unsurpassed. The effect is completed by the countenance, where on the perfection of youthful godlike beauty there dwells the consciousness of triumphant power.

Thomas Bulfinch, commenting on the Apollo Belvedere in Bulfinch's Mythology.

An open mind is okay, but you should fill it first.

JG, said in class.

Old age is the only stage of life we never grow out of, and can never look back on.

Jill Lepore, Twilight, The New Yorker (March 14, 2011)

The coat-of-arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an axe on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone.

We do no benevolences whose first benefit is not for ourselves.

Mark Twain, Reflections on a Letter and a Book, The Autobiography of Mark Twain.

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.

Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain.

I plung'd for life or death. To interknit
One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff
Might seem a work of pain; so not enough
Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt,
And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt
Whole days and days in sheer astonishment;
Forgetful utterly of self-intent;
Moving but with the mighty ebb and flow.
Then, like a new fledg'd bird that first doth shew
His spreaded feathers to the morrow chill,
I tried in fear the pinions of my will.
'Twas freedom! and at once I visited
The ceaseless wonders of this ocean-bed.

Glaucus on entering the sea and breathing water, Keat's ENDYMION (line 380)

His superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

James Boswell, on Johnson, in his Life of Samuel Johnson

Against inquisitive and perplexing thoughts,

O Lord, my Maker and Protector, who hast graciously sent me into this world to work out my salvation, enable me to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties which Thou hast required. When I behold the works of thy hands, and consider the course of thy providence, give me grace always to remember that thy thoughts are not my thoughts, nor thy ways my ways. And while it shall please thee to continue me in this world, where much is to be done, and little to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit, to withdraw my mind from unprofitable and dangerous enquiries, from difficulties vainly curious, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted, let me serve thee with active zeal and humble confidence and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge. Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

A Prayer by Samuel Johnson (1784) as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Sagacity is the eye of the mind, intuition the mind's nose.

Samuel Johnson (1784) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his must humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved at such times." You don't mind the times. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet." You don't care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly.

....

I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest; and people are apt to believe me serious: however, I am more candid than I was when I was younger. As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.


Samuel Johnson (1783) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Why do you weep and grieve so sorely when you hear
the fate of the Argives, hear the fall of Troy?
That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
and all to make a song for those to come...

Homer, The Odyssey (Book 8, line 645, as translated by Robert Fagles)

Talking of conversation.... There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials;--in the second place, there must be a command of words;--in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in;--and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures...

Samuel Johnson (1783) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Whatever befalls us, though it is wise to be serious, it is useless and foolish, and perhaps sinful, to be gloomy.

Samuel Johnson (1782) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Sir, it is driving on the system of life.

Samuel Johnson commenting (1781) on why we continue to try, as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Be bold, nothing to fear.
In every venture the bold man comes off best.

Homer, The Odyssey (Book 7, line 59, as translated by Robert Fagles)

Sir, a man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in.... Every body loves to have good things furnished to them without any trouble.

Samuel Johnson commenting (1781) on the pleasure of mixing ready food and drink with conversation, as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Zeus is to blame. He deals to each and every laborer on this earth whatever doom he pleases.


Homer, The Odyssey (Book 1, line 401, as translated by Robert Fagles)

A great mind disdains to hold any thing by courtesy, and therefore never usurps what a lawful claimant may take away. He that encroaches on another's dignity, puts himself in his power; he is either repelled with helpless indignation, or endured by clemency and condescension.

Samuel Johnson, from his Lives of the Poets as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Depend upon it...if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Samuel Johnson (1780) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

I have sat at home in Bolt-court, all summer, thinking to write the Lives, and a great part of the time only thinking. Several of them, however, are done, and I still think to do the rest....I would have gone to Lichfield if I could have had time, and I might have had the time if I had been active; but I have missed much, and done little.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, August 21, 1780 is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Even a fool learns something once it hits him.

Homer, The Illiad

There is nothing alive more agonized than man
of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

Zeus, The Illiad (Book 17, line 514, Robert Fagles' translation)

He had no more learning than what he could not help.

Johnson on a member of the Literati on April 16, 1779 as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

In all pleasure hope is a considerable part.

Johnson on April 7, 1779 as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

…the dream departed, leaving him there, his heart racing with hopes that would not come to pass.

Agamemnon's dream, The Illiad (Book Two, line 40, Robert Fagles' translation)

Force is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.


Simone Weil, The Illiad, Or The Poem of Force

Hope of salvation must be founded on the terms on which it is promised that the mediation of our Saviour shall be applied to us,--namely obedience; and where obedience has failed, then, as suppletory to it, repentance. But what man can say that his obedience has been such, as he would approve of in another, or even in himself upon close examination, or that his repentance has not been such as to require being repented of?

… mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain…

… it is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.

Johnson on April 15, 1778 as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Buddha sought "a wholly different way of living as a human being."

In the Chain of Dependent Causation, karma (actions) determine consciousness. Consciousness - "the last idea or impulse of a dying human being" - determines rebirth.

From Karen Armstrong's Buddha

For every downhill,
the deeper the easier,
there is an uphill,
the steeper the harder.

A Lesson From Biking

I dreamed a lot when I was younger
I'm older now and still I hunger
For some understanding,
There's no understanding, now
Was there ever?

Ambrosia, Harvey

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself.... A bad man survives but loses his soul.

John LeCarre, The Mission Song

God in the most deeply hidden of His manifestations...is called 'He.' God in the complete unfolding of his Being, Grace and Love, in which He becomes capable of being perceived by the 'reason of the heart'...is called 'You.' But God in His supreme manifestation, where the fullness of His Being finds its final expression in the last and all-embracing of His attributes, is called 'I.'

The Zohar

You don't ever have to say anything....Always remember that. Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Claire Keegan, Foster, The New Yorker (February 15 & 22, 2010)

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

William Faulkner

A mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness.

Susan Orlean, Riding High: Mules in the military, The New Yorker (February 15 & 22, 2010)

The truly successful businessman...is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least possible risk while hunting....Entrepreneurial spirit could not have less in common with that of the daring risk-taker of popular imagination.

Malcom Gladwell, The Sure Thing: How entrepreneurs really succeed, The New Yorker (January 18, 2010)

Tests have shown that greater diversity in systems from grassland plants to rock-hugging marine invertebrates increases the basic productivity of an ecosystem.

Losing life’s variety, Science News of March 13, 2010

Marine Corps Rules:

01. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
02. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
03. Have a plan.
04. Have a back-up plan, because the first one probably won't work.
05. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
06. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun whose caliber does not start with a '4.'
07. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
08. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend (Lateral & diagonal preferred.)
09. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
10. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.
11. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
12. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
13. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating your intention to shoot.

There are various versions of these on the web. But a friend sent me these and they can be easily altered to fit the bureaucratic environment.

Some speeches are highly analytical, well argued, thought provoking and unproductive, all at the same time.

From a good friend and mentor.

To exist is to have identity; to have identity means one is what one is and one is not what one is not; which means, to have causes and consequences, pain and pleasure, experience and cessation. To exist means to exist within a context. To be defined. To be finite….

Life was matter imbued with meaning; matter aware of itself, and, because of that awareness, aware that it was more than mere matter…aware of the universe…of its identity, its finitude.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence

Chaos has killed me....But the victory of unpredictability is hallow. Men imagine, in their pride, that they can predict life's each event, and govern nature and govern each other with rules of unyielding iron. Not so. There will always be men...who will do the things no one else predicts or can control....For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer. The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Stacks.

If someone with a sharp axe
hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,
and spoils its handsome shape;
although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself
if it come later to a winter fire
or if it rests on the pillars of some palace
and does a sad task among foreign walls
when there is nothing left in the place it comes from.

Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode as translated by Bernard Williams
and quoted in Charles Freeman's magisterial Egypt, Greece and Rome

How great the barriers can be between a person and his happiness,
How little it can take to make them seem small.

Marisa Silver (paraphrased)

After years of waiting nothing came
As your life flashed before your eyes
You realize

I'm a reasonable man
Get off my case

Radiohead, Packt Like Sardines

Tell us what we did wrong and you can blame us for it.

Andrew Bird, Heretics.

"This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it."

Barack Obama, September 2008 (as quoted in Game Change).

When you get there, you get there and that's the way it goes.

Otis Taylor

What experience and history teach is this: people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

G.W.F. Hegel

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.

Jean Shepherd

You can only take what you can carry.

Snow Patrol

The history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles...but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

[E]veryone wants to be the center of the universe.

Colin Negrych as quoted by Nick Palmgarten

[A] mortal soul, the non-corporeal essence of ourselves lurking within our flesh...flourishing when we flourish, and dying when we die.

Salman Rushdie, "In the South"

Both in the May 18, 2009 New Yorker.

From now on, you are you.


Mahmoud Darwish, From Now On You Are You

Whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them.

John C. Wright, The Golden Age

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I'm a rocket man

Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time...

Elton John, Rocket Man

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world. I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me...

A fictional agent of the UN Security Council in Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The God of Small Things....If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

No beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.


William Gibson

It's just another day in paradise
As you stumble to your bed
You'd give anything to silence
Those voices ringing in your head
You thought you could find happiness
Just over that green hill
You thought you would be satisfied
But you never will-
Learn to be still

We are like sheep without a shepherd
We don't know how to be alone
So we wander 'round this desert
And wind up following the wrong gods home
But the flock cries out for another
And they keep answering that bell
And one more starry-eyed messiah
Meets a violent farewell-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

Now the flowers in your garden
They don't smell so sweet so sweet
Maybe you've forgotten
The heaven lying at your feet

There are so many contradictions
In all these messages we send
(We keep asking)
How do I get out of here?
Where do I fit in?
Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin'
It's waiting for you to awaken
And someday you will-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

You just keep on runnin'
Keep on runnin'

The Eagles, Learn to be Still

You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye.

CSN&Y, Teach Your Children

The latest findings highlight once again the extent to which obesity is a consequence of Homo sapiens carrying into an era of abundance, leisure and warmth the physiology that humans evolved in a world marked by barely enough food, constant physical activity and dangerous cold.

From a Washington Post article on brown fat.

In short, the key to the salvation of the West was the Persian defeat by the Greeks, which required a victory at Salamis, which in turn could not have occurred without the repeated efforts—all against opposition—of a single Athenian statesman. Had he wavered, had he been killed, or had he lacked the moral and intellectual force to press home his arguments, it is likely that Greece would have become a satrapy of Persia.

Victor Davis Hanson on Themistocles in “No Glory That Was Greece” in What If?, edited by Robert Cowley

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.

Practice is when everything works but nobody knows why.

Unknown

A man so often only finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.

G.K.Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown.

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Bishop Joseph Butler

When you are happy, it's surprising how much you can drink.


From a friend from North Mitrovica -- soon to get married -- over coffee at DV.

There are times that we cannot seem to find our center. We have to find someplace to stand at the edges of ourselves. This seems the only place for us to exist and get through day-to-day. We cannot do this for so long but if we had a choice, we'd probably try to get closer in where it is more comfortable.

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Salman Rushdie, “The Shelter of the World,” The New Yorker of Feb. 25,2008

Human purpose may be a long-evolved consequence of the thermodynamic tendency to come to equilibrium....the process of life -- complexity building in the area of gradients, and energy flow -- is a natural phenomenon....life's natural purpose.

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

In most systems diversity begets stability.

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

When the energy available for the formation of complex systems is taken away, these systems revert to a more primitive level of function.

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

The sensing selves of the biosphere were brought into being, and are maintained, by thermodynamic potential and the molecular informational complexity necessary to tap it....Organisms may be seen as connectable nodes that transform the environment as they mediate energetic flows....Quickly growing systems -- ones that through evolution, technology, or both. tap into previously unrecognized or untapped gradients -- may spread like wildfire. But like raging flames, they rob themselves of their own resources.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 158-59)

What we call life is neither a thing apart from matter, nor merely "living matter," but an informational and energetic process...

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

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