Shiva, they say, is twofold…. utterly transcendent and … “without parts”.… the source and essence of all…. But Shiva is also “with parts” [and] shows himself visibly in many forms…. The divine expands, evolving as if from seed, and stretching into the immense, indeed infinite reality of the cosmos, which lives and breathes.

From India: A Sacred Geography (Ch 5) by Diana L. Eck

There is no shore on the other side

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I cannot help thinking that liberal civilization—the rule of laws, not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence—runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature. The liberal virtues—tolerance, compromise, reason—remain as valuable as ever, but they cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear or mad with vengeance. In any case, preaching always rings hollow. We must be prepared to defend them by force, and the failure of the sated, cosmopolitan nations to do so has left the hungry nations sick with contempt for us.

Michael Ignatieff

Life should be a fight to the death.

Tarquin Hall, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

It doesn't have to be understood to be real.

Peter Lanza

When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.


Attributed to Napoleon

Consciousness was indeed real.  It had observable energy.  That energy translated into movement, into work.  That energy ordered information, the stuff of the world, the matter, and recycled that order back into itself, lifting itself to ever higher ground.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music 

Consciousness was firmly embedded in the fabric of space and time, a material part of its vibrational energy.  Consciousness, or mind, was not split off from matter, hovering outside it.... Instead, consciousness was within matter, of matter.  It was matter looking at itself and being astonished.  It was the point seeing the wave, or the wave seeing the point.  Consciousness was quantum electrodynamism.  Time turned back upon itself.  Time splintering.  Time strutting loose among the energy levels, only slightly stilled, slightly caught, in that glance called consciousness, the observer, the energy that made it into this and not-this, live cat and dead cat.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music

Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.

Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

Whenever there is a withering of the law
and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides,
then I manifest Myself.

For the salvation of the righteous
and the destruction of such as do evil,
for the firm establishing of the Law,
I come to birth, age after age.

 Bhagavad Gita, Book IV, Sutra 5, 7, 8

Ullrich told me about a small boy who was dying of neuroblastoma. “His mother made it very clear to him that she would see him again in Heaven someday. ... But he was worried about how he would find her. So they made a plan to meet in the front left corner of Heaven."

Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker, "Lives Less Ordinary" (January 20, 2014)

Christmas time ... a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. 


Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.

Abraham Lincoln on the effort to preserve the United States government in America's Civil War, from his First Message to Congress, July 4, 1861.

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure;
but security enough to make fellowships accurst.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Thou art not thyself;
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of the dust.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

O place, O form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming!

Blood, thou art blood.


William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est

(“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”).

Quoted by Pope Francis on the vision of St. Ignatius

You should only pick your own nose.


Heard from a nice lady in Iowa.

Relationships were ... utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life.  We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars