From Carmel Schrire, Digging through Darkness 1995:71
See K. Kris Hirst's Archaeology Quote of the Week for more graphics and quotes.
"I am not a number, I am a free man!" -- the Prisoner"
"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."
-- Antoine--Roger de Saint-Exupery
"I put on my Hendrix album and my son said 'Daddy, who's that' and I said 'well son, that's God'"- Robert Plant
"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy" Bette Davis (1908 - 1989)
"I have lost many friends - some through death, some through sheer inability to cross the street. ~V. Woolfe"
Humans are good ... at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent. Carl Sagan (1985) Contact.
Just because the director yells "action!" doesn't mean you have to do anything.
Marlon Brando
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde
"Some wish, some prevailing wish, is necessary to the animation of everybody's mind."
- Jane Austen
It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats.
Russian proverb
"The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That's real glory. That's the essence of it."
Vince Lombardi (1913 - 1970) American Football Coach
Even in our theoretical stance to the world, we are agents. - Charles Taylor
Philosophical Arguments
"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith" (II Timothy chp 4:7 King James Version)
When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.
~ Sufi Epigram ~
"i like to drink martinis
two at the very most
three, i'm under the table
four, i'm under the host"
-Dorothy Parker
He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
I never know what I think until I read what I say.
Franciene du Plessix Gray
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
- -Antoine De Saint-Exupery [Wind, Sand, Stars]
Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge, virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by degrees, a pot is filled.
-The Hitopadesa
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." - Louis Pasteur
Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction...
The chain reaction of evil --
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars --
must be broken, or we shall be plunged
into the darkness of annihilation.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things?"
-- Eric R. Wolf (1923-1999)
Nothing is more absolute than the fact that nothing is absolute(Strauss, S. The Sizezaurus, 1994:4)
At any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt
"He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty - that the forest makes a claim upon Man's hearts as far as for the subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanates from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
* Robert Louis Stevenson
In the end we will conserve what we love. We will love what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
* Baba Dioum
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
* Walt Whitman
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it : but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin curent slides away, but eternity remains. * * Henry David Thoreau (Waldon - 1854)
We are all ONE, say the gurus. Aye, I might agree - but one What?
* Edward Abbey (A voice crying in the Wilderness - 1989)
"Nothing in fine print is ever good news."
* Andy Rooney
"I used to believe very strongly that in order to write anything worthwhile, you needed to be in some sort of crisis... and I would manufacture crises in order to be able to write."
* Sting
"The Strange Case of the Self, your self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos...Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest?"
* from the Preface to Lost in the Cosmos, A novel by Walker Percy
"The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more."
* Jonas Salk, M. D.
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!
* Ned Flanders, "Lisa the Skeptic" episode, The Simpsons
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empire but it is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."
* Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Science has proof without any certainty.
Creationists have certainty without any proof
* Ashley Montagu
"I fight with love, and I laugh with rage. Gotta live light enough to see some humor, and long enough to see some change."
* ani difranco
When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.
* Mark Twain - Following the Equator
Remember compassion is the fire, that burns the hurt, that pains the soul. And though your eyes are so polluted by the sight of what you've witnessed, keep council with whomever you hold supreme.
* Joan Armatrading (about the events of 9/11)
There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.
* Annie Lennox, 1990
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
* Anthony Trollope
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"
* Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 1981.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
* Hanlon
"All you really need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." * Mark Twain
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
* Oscar Wilde
"When the mouth stumbles, it is worse than the foot."
* West African Proverb
The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness.
* Albert Einstein
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
* Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)
There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
* James Thurber
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist.
This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
* Matt Cartmill,anthropology professor and author (1943- )
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
* Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Poet (1861-1941)
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
* Robert Louis Stevenson
I like simple, if it's complex then I don't understand it.
* Seymour Cray, inventor of the Cray supercomputer
To have and not to give is often worse than to steal.
* Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
* Victor Hugo, poet, novelist and dramatist (1802-1885)
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
* Albert Camus, writer and philosopher (1913-1960)
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"* Albert Einstein
Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.
* Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently, honorably, and justly; or to live prudently, honorably, and justly, without living pleasurably.
* Epicurus (B.C. 341-270)
I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.
* Benjamin Barber
Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.
* Alice M. Swaim
"He who understands [the] baboon, would do more toward metaphysics than Locke"
* Charles Darwin
"Zeal and sincerity can carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and sword."
* Mark Twain, "Christian Science"
"Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it."
* Dana Scully
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
* Plutarch
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"
* ani difranco
"On a purely practical and rather trivial level, there is much in common between the techniques of the archaeological excavator and those of the biological dissector and the anatomist. Admittedly pick, shovel and trowel have no place in the dissecting-room; but for all of that, both techniques require a comparable sureness of touch and keenness of eye; and both are equally destructive of the specimen."
* R.J.C. Atkinson, in Archaeology, History and Science
"Archaeological worlds are like parallel worlds, places that may have once existed in time, been inhabited and gone, although that's not the important thing now: rather they are worlds poised between the familiar and something altogether new, like moon-rocks brought back to earth. These are the in-between creative spaces which can only be entered when you leave the quotidian behind."
* Judith Weingarten
"The nature of science is constantly under negotiation, and the currency of these negotiations is success."
* David Hull
"It surpasses all wonder that a day goes by where in the whole world is not consumed in flame."
* Pliny, Natural History
"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."
* Football commentator and former player Joe Theismann 1996
"…. A scientist need not be a good person to do good science. Some of the most impossible scientists have been the most productive."
* David Hull
One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself--I can't live where I want to--I can't go where I want to go--I can't do what I want to--I can't even say what I want to--....I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
* Georgia O'Keeffe, 1923
"The truest kinds of thoughts - They are so profound that even their opposites are also true."
* Neils Bohr
"Where all think alike, no one thinks much."
* Walter Lippman
The scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all- that his accumulation proves an entirely different thing.
* Mark Twain
Shaquille O'Neal on whether he had visited the Parthenon during his visit to Greece: "I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we went to."
Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn I lean'd the Secret of my Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur'd - "While you live, Drink! - for, once dead, you never shall return."
* Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
I was resting comfortably, face down in the gutter
Life was serene, I knew where I was at
"There's no hope for him," my dearest friends would mutter
I was something dragged in by the cat. Then ...Just in time, I found you just in time
Before you came, my time was runnin' low
I was lost, the losin' dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed, nowhere to go
Now you're here and now I know just where I'm goin'
No more doubt or fear, I found my way
For love came just in time
You found me just in time
And changed my lonely life that lovely day<instrumental break for first two lines>
Mm, I was lost, the losin' dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed, nowhere to go
Now you're here and now I know just where I'm goin'
No more doubt or fear, I found my way
For love came just in time
You found me just in time
And changed my lonely life that lovely day
* Just in Time, Sung in the musical "Bells Are Ringing" by Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin
Words by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Music by Jule Styne
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
* G. W. F. Hegel
"According to the seed that is sown,
So is the fruit you reap
The door of good of will gather good result
The door of evil reaps evil result.
If you plant a good seed well,
Then you will enjoyed the good fruits."
* Buddha
"...Nothing that is worth doing can be accomplished in your lifetime; therefore you will have to be saved by hope. Nothing that is beautiful will make sense in the immediate instance; therefore you must be saved by faith. Nothing that is worth doing can be done alone, but has to be done with others; Therefore you must be saved by love."
-Reinhold Niebuhr as quoted by Edward Dewey, Cycles, 1973, p201
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
* Arthur C. Clarke
If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.
* John Bunyan, preacher and author (1628-1688)
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
* Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. & * Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
* Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
* Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cat's Cradle
"This machine surrounds hate & forces it to surrender."
* inscription in pete seeger's banjo
Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it's essential … There's no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.
* Mark Monmonier, How to lie with maps
"The past can understood only through the present."
--Albert Spaulding
For several hundred yards from the shore the air is filled with gulls and terns, as with snowflakes on a winter day. Thousands of plovers and sand-coursers run over the beach, searching their food, whistling, and simply enjoying life. Further on, on almost each wave, a duck is rocking, while higher up you notice the flocks of the Casarki ducks. Exuberant life swarms everywhere.
-- Syevertsoff, Periodical Phenomena.
Yes! I know from whence I spring. Never sated like a fire. Glowing, I myself consume. All I seize and touch makes light, All I leave behind me ashes, Surely, flame is what I am.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo
"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
-- Publilius Syrus (first century B.C.), Maxim 358
"Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long."
--Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
"Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them."
--Suzanne Necker
"Computers are actuaully powered by Choas theory, not electricty... that is just for the fan."
T. Hessler
"The idea of such a thing as a map is at once one of the most primative and the most civilized of human feats. It is both a yen and a conception, like such other old but ever new ideas as music and dance, myth and fiction, image and depiction, thought and symbol."
--David Greenhood, Mapping
Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe:
"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin:
"Women are the real architects of society."
Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not.
The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Jestor
Alice had in fact hardly read Lenin. She felt for him a kind of bowing down of her whole person, like a genuflection, as to the Perfect Man. That such a giant can have lived! Was her feeling, and it was enough. If it came to that, she had read not much more of Marx than the "Communist Manifesto". She had always said of herself/ "Well, I am not an intellectual!"- with a feeling of superiority.
-- Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosefay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
The Doors of Perception -- Aldous Huxley
I don't know. I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.
Jack Kerouac
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as a charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted.
On Spirituality in Art -- Wassily Kandinsky
Hustlers of the world, There is one mark you cannot beat -- the mark inside.
William S. Burroughs
There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations - in short, by metaphysics. I believe that ever true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a "positivist" he may fancy himself. The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory experience can be "comprehended" on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a "miracle creed." Admittedly so, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science."
-- Albert Einstein 1950 ( Scientific American, Vol. 182, No. 4)
"If age imparted wisdom, there wouldn't be any old fools."
-- Claudia Young
``How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?''
--Dr. Seuss
It was the lesson of our great ancestor: Confucius
The people should be cherished,
and not looked down upon.
The people are the root of a country;
The root firm, the country is tranquil.
When I look at all under heaven.
If you never repeat what you are told,
You will fare none the worse.
Before friend or foe do not recount it,
And unless it would be sinful of you,
Do not reveal it.
For someone has heard you and watched you,
And when the time comes he will hate you.
If you hear something said let it die with you,
Have courage, It will not make you burst!.
The book of Jesus Ben Sirach
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself for in all the flories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked like that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there...
--- Marlow in Joseph Conrard's Heart of Darkness
Rulers - of the best rulers
The people (only) know that they exist;
The next best they love and praise;
The next they fear;
And the rest they revile.
When they do not command the people's faith.
Some will lose faith in them,
And then they resort to oaths!
But (of the best) when their task
Is accomplished, their work done,
The people all remake "We have done it ourselves."
-- Lao-Tze, Toa Teh King
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my reality.
---Frida Kahlo
Mark Twain on Love
Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.
- The Memorable Assassination essay
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1959, preface
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
- Notebook, 1898
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
"Only when lions have historians, will hunters cease being heroes"
-- African Proverb
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.''
-Dr. Seuss
"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods that they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field, the products of his imagination appears so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities."
-- Albert Einstein 1933 (Herbert Spencer Lecture)
General Review of the Sex Situation
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
-- Dorothy Parker - Enough Rope
"I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them."
--Jane Austen
"I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Isaac Newton
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
When I was fifteen, I was thirty-five. When I was thirty-five, I was fifteen."
-- Loretta Lynn
Paul Valery
"A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key."
Calvin Coolidge
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Albert Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Cicero
"By doubting we come at truth."
Well you know you can't spend what you ain't got,
you can't lose some blues you ain't never had
- Muddy Waters
Anais Nin
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
Cicero
Anyone who has got a book collection/library and a garden wants for nothing.
Mahatma Gandhi
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
James Joyce
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
Snoopy: "Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement."
Kenich Ohmae: "It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away."
Mao Tse-tung
"In waking a tiger, use a long stick."
Dick Brandon
"Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
Timothy Leary
"There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third."
W. Somerset Maugham
"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
T. E. Lawrence
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
"It may be irrational of me, but human beings are quite my favorite species."
* Doctor Who
A line is a dot that moves - Christina Kochanski
It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-Andrew Jackson
I can hear young yuppies yellin',
"The blues just ain't for me"
But if you're drivin' a taxi,
And you got a Ph.D.
You got the blues, young yuppy
Sometimes you have 'em every day
- Jeannie & Jimmy Cheatham
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
-Bertrand Russell
Education is a admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-Oscar Wilde
My love is like the lofty tree
It shudders fears and then sways free
If it should fade when the summer's through
She'll bloom again when Spring shines through
The river is wide / The Kingston Trio
"When you seek it, you cannot find it."
--Zen saying
Oscar Wilde, upon seeing the Niagara Falls for the first time, is said to have remarked: "it would be more impressive if it flowed the other way" -
Africa always brings [us] something new.
Pliny the Elder ( AD 23-79 )
Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods
as there are individual scientists.
Percy W. Bridgman (From: Reflections of a Physicist, 1955)
"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark."
--Saint John of the Cross
"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
--Baba Ram Dass
"I have always been a great believer in TODAY. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all...Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere."
--Alfred Steiglitz, 1937
Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it around like marmalade.
-Noel Coward
Henry Louis Mencken
"For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong."
Douglas Adams
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
"Science is to see what everyone else has seen but think what no one else has thought."
Muhammad Ali
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
George Orwell
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Frank Herbert
"The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand."
"Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."
* Phillip K. Dick
"I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary."
*Jules Feiffer
I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them....The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change-anything for society.
* Mark Twain, a Biography
Mathematics ...for one of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are. You see it's very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it's there, but you just don't know where-but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.
* The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Jestor
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, But which will bloom most constantly?
* Emily Brontë Love and Friendship
Love is like a faucet, you can turn it off an' on, But when you think you've got it, it's done turned off and gone.
* Blues song
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question.
--Lily Tomlin (attributed)
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Wind, Sand, and Stars
I love her too, but our neuroses don't match.
--Arthur Miller The Ride Down Mount Morgan
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-Werner Heisenberg 1901-1976