Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Friday, February 06, 2015

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. 

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose.  It is best so, no doubt.  The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Monday, January 19, 2015

The totality of animals, the crushing majority of men, live without ever finding the least need for justification.


Michel Houellebecq, from his novel Submission as quoted by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Twitter—that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think.


 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, How the Murdoch Gang Got Away (New York Review, Jan 8, 2015)

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

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

Monday, December 01, 2014

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)

Sunday, November 30, 2014

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.

Monday, November 24, 2014

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

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Saturday, November 15, 2014

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

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

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


A riff on Lewis Carroll

Friday, October 10, 2014

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

Thursday, September 25, 2014

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)

Thursday, September 18, 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.  

Monday, September 15, 2014

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)

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

The earth, the water, the fire, the air, and the void -- these indeed are the five principles by which the entire universe is pervaded.

Abhinavagupta, as quoted by Diana L. Eck in India: a Sacred Geography

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life.  That is its job.  Your job is to notice.


Michael Harris, as quoted by The Economist (August 16, 2014)

Friday, August 08, 2014

Mammalian minds evolved to track external dangers and opportunities.... Only humans acquired an ability to focus solely on internal thoughts.... [But] people go to surprisingly great lengths to avoid being stranded with their own thoughts.

Science News, People Find Solitude Distressing