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