Quotes

i. “The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich.” (Robertson Davies)

ii. “Like a real academic, she was wary of people outside the academic world — ‘laymen’ they called them — who seemed to know a lot. Knowledge was for professionals of knowledge.” (-ll-)

iii. “If you don’t hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you’ll get.” (-ll-)

iv. “I was embarrassed to be such a fool in a situation that I had told myself and other people countless times I would never submit to — talking to a psychiatrist, ostensibly seeking help, but without any confidence that he could give it. I have never believed these people can do anything for an intelligent man he can’t do for himself. I have known many people who leaned on psychiatrists, and every one of them was a leaner by nature, who would have leaned on a priest if he had lived in an age of faith, or leaned on a teacup reader or an astrologer if he had not enough money to afford the higher hokum.” (-ll-)

v. “Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.” (-ll-)

vi. “Unhappiness of the kind that is recognized and examined and brooded over is a spiritual luxury.” (-ll-)

vii. “Promise is most given when the least is said.” (George Chapman)

viii. “In his discussions of such matters as “What is justice?” or “What is virtue?” he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called “Socratic irony,” for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn’t know what they were talking about.

It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn’t till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.” (Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong)

ix. “Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” (George Orwell)

x. “The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they’re all inconsistent with each other.” (Larry Wall)

xi. “Each instant of life is a step toward death.” (Pierre Corneille)

xii. “Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart, and secure comfort.” (Humphry Davy)

xiii. “men of sense often learn from their enemies. [...] It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.” (Aristophanes)

xiv. “Men of ill judgement oft ignore the good
That lies within their hands, till they have lost it.” (Sophocles)

xv. “Unwanted favours gain no gratitude.” (-ll-)

xvi. “A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party: there is no battle unless there be two.” (Seneca)

xvii. “There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blamable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavor the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretense of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.” (David Hume)

xviii. “The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.” (-ll-)

xix. “No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity.” (-ll-)

xx. “The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.” (Robertson Davies)

Quotes

i. “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” (H. L. Mencken)

ii. “if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.” (William Kingdon Clifford, The Ethics of Belief – the full text is available here)

iii. “If you wish to be good, first believe that you are bad.” (Epictetus)

iv. “If you have assumed a character beyond your strength, you have both played a poor figure in that, and neglected one that is within your powers.” (-ll-)

v. “Let silence be your general rule; or say only what is necessary and in few words. [...] Above all avoid speaking of persons, either in the way of praise or blame, or comparison. If you can, win over the conversation of your company to what it should be by your own. But if you should find yourself cut off without escape among strangers and aliens, be silent.” (-ll-)

vi. “Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.” (Bertrand Russell)

vii. “Science does not know its debt to imagination.” (Emerson)

viii. “Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.” (Marcus Aurelius)

ix. “Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man’s life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.” (-ll-)

x. “To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.” (-ll-)

xi. “A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something.” (-ll-)

xii. “People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after.” (Oliver Goldsmith)

xiii. “That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel.” (-ll-)

xiv. “Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.” (Cicero)

xv. “That is the true perfection of man to find out his imperfections.” (Augustine of Hippo)

xvi. “Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity; for what has posterity done for us?” (Boyle Roche)

xvii. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” (Richard Steele)

xviii. “A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it.” (-ll-)

xix. “No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience…” (-ll-)

xx. “When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.” (Joseph Addison)

Quotes

i. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” (T. S. Eliot)

ii. “They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.” (-ll-)

iii. “We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.” (-ll-)

iv. “Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.” (-ll-)

v. “Your burden is not to clear your conscience
But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.” (-ll-)

vi. “I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.” (Edgar Allan Poe)

vii. “Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.” (John Locke)

viii. “Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” (Laurence Johnston Peter)

ix. “To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

x. “The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” (Daniel J. Boorstin)

xi. “Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.” (-ll-)

xii. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.” (-ll-)

xiii. “Gallantry of mind consists in saying flattering things in an agreeable manner.” (Rochefoucauld)

xiv. “If our inward griefs were seen written on our brow, how many would be pitied who are now envied!” (Metastasio)

xv. “For the whole world, without a native home,
Is nothing but a prison of larger room.” (Abraham Cowley)

xvi. “No one can be so welcome a guest that he will not become an annoyance when he has stayed three continuous days in a friend’s house.” (Plautus)

xvii. “He is ungrateful who denies that he has received a kindness which has been bestowed upon him; he is ungrateful who conceals it; he is ungrateful who makes no return for it; most ungrateful of all is he who forgets it.” (Seneca)

xviii. “One ungrateful man does an injury to all who are in suffering.” (-ll-)

xix. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple of them and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” (John Steinbeck)

xx. “We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.” (-ll-)

Quotes

I have started reading Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations and some of the quotes below are from that work. I may blog the book later, but I assume that given the amount of quotes in that work I may just decide to incorporate some of the good quotes from the book into future quotes posts without actually doing a lot of talking about the book itself here on the blog (I’ve handled other books of a similar nature in a similar manner in the past). Of course as you may be aware I’ve already used a lot of quotes which are also included in this book in past quotes posts; I should probably make clear – again – that I do try quite hard to avoid reposting quotes that I’ve already covered elsewhere. I should note also that I ‘read’ this book in a different way from how I read e.g. The Oxford Book of Aphorisms; there are a lot of crappy quotes in this book, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time reading about what religious nutters have said about Angels or Jesus, or perhaps what people who lived 200 years ago wrote about gardens, or butterflies, or mermaids. Especially as quite a few of the quoted writers had an annoying habit of being wearisomely verbose. Anyway, some quotes:

i. “Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.” (Carlyle)

ii. “I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.” (Michael Crichton)

iii. “We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.” (-ll-)

iv. “A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there is no river.” (Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram)

v. ”What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys but that our hopes cease.” (Jean Paul)

vi. “We all, when we are well, give good advice to the sick.” (Terence)

vii. “Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the Beauty that accompanies what is natural.” (Locke)

viii. He who boasts of his descent, praises the  deeds of another. (Seneca)

ix. “Nothing is more dishonourable than an old man, heavy with years, who has no other evidence of his having lived long except his age.” (-ll-)

x. “A crowd of fellow-sufferers is a miserable kind of comfort.” (-ll-)

xi. “Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

xii. “Be always displeased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest.” (Francis Quarles)

xiii. “Ambition has but one reward for all:
A little power, a little transient fame,
A grave to rest in, and a fading name!” (William Winter, according to Hoyt’s… – often (seemingly) incorrectly attributed Walter Savage Landor)

xiv. “Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.” (Benjamin Disraeli)

xv. “Fear not the anger of the wise to raise;
Those best can bear reproof who merit praise.” (Pope)

xvi. “Apes are apes though clothed in scarlet.” (Ben Jonson)

xvii. ““We all know dogmatists who are more concerned about holding their opinions than about investigating their truth. … if they are mistaken, they will never discover it; they have condemned themselves to perpetual error. Human beings (including myself) sometimes use their beliefs for wish-fulfillment. Too often we believe what we want to be true.” (David Wolfe)

xviii. “That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time.” (Charles Caleb Colton)

xix. “No author ever drew a character, consistent to human nature, but what he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.” (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

xx. “As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.” (James Froude)

Quotes

i. “”All education is a struggle,” said Marchbanks. “I had to struggle against schools and universities, of course, in order to get time to educate myself, which I did magnificently.”" (Robertson Davies)

ii. “I think a great many marriages would be saved if people would behave toward one another with the same courtesy that they would extend to someone whom they really didn’t know as well as a marriage necessarily implies. … It’s not very easy to do, but it is surely easier to do than to haggle and nag and fight and bitch and yelp at one another as you hear a lot of married people doing … They seem to feel that the familiarity of affection permits anything, including insult.” (-ll-)

iii. “I have known far too many university graduates, in this country and in my own, who, as soon as they have received the diploma which declares them to be of Certified Intelligence, put their brains in cold storage and never use them again until they are hauled away to the mortuary.” (-ll-)

iv. “Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives.” (-ll-)

v. “To oblige a friend by inflicting an injury on his enemy is often more easy than to confer a benefit on the friend himself.” (Anthony Trollope)

vi. “Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.” (-ll-)

vii. “It is easy for most of us to keep our hands from picking and stealing when picking and stealing plainly lead to prison diet and prison garments. But when silks and satins come of it, and with the silks and satins general respect, the net result of honesty does not seem to be so secure.” (-ll-. See also this.)

viii. “It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.” (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

ix. “Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. [...] A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.” (-ll-)

x. “My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.” (Charles Bukowski)

xi. “Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” (Jack London)

xii. “Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.” (-ll-)

xiii. “Isolation is the worst possible counselor.” (Miguel de Unamuno)

xiv. “Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.” (William Makepeace Thackeray)

xv. “A man must be himself convinced if he is to convince others. The prophet must be his own disciple, or he will make none. Enthusiasm is contagious: belief creates belief.” (George Henry Lewes)

xvi. “There are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity.” (-ll-)

xvii. “I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.” (Sinclair Lewis)

xviii. “The best kind of charity is to help those who are willing to help themselves.” (P. T. Barnum)

xix. “Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires.” (Michael Faraday)

xx. “Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.” (Jacques Delille. (Le sort fait les parents, la choix fait les amis.))

Quotes

i. “To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like paté de foie gras.” (Arthur Koestler. This may also apply to bloggers and blogs…)

ii. “Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be. But compromises tell us who we are.” (Avishai Margalit)

iii. ”If being married was roughly what one thought it would be like, every couple would stay married until death parted them.” (Michelle Mirsky)

iv. “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” (James Gleick)

v. “The point of seeing both sides isn’t to hover between them but to be able to come down on the right side with the right degree of conviction.” (Julian Baggini)

vi. “We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgement to shine.” (Nietzsche – ‘Man lobt oder tadelt, je nachdem das Eine oder das Andere mehr Gelegenheit giebt, unsere Urtheilskraft leuchten zu lassen’)

vii. “There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.” (Nietzsche)

viii. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” (Gabriel García Márquez)

ix. “No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.” (Anthony Trollope)

x. “Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.” (-ll-)

xi. “There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, — and always to plead it successfully.” (-ll-)

xii. “Above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.” (-ll-)

xiii. “He had married, let us say for love; — probably very much by chance.” (-ll-)

xiv. “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.” (Mark Twain)

xv. “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” (-ll-)

xvi. “All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.” (-ll-)

xvii. “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” (-ll-)

xviii. “His reply had that clarity, objectivity and reasonableness which is possible only to advisers who have completely missed the point.” (Robertson Davies)

xix. “To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.” (-ll-)

xx. “I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them — often in the same bed — a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.” (-ll-)

Quotes

i. “A friend in power is a friend lost.” (Henry Brooks Adams)

ii. “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” (George Bernard Shaw)

iii. “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” (Francis Beaumont / John Fletcher)

iv. “It doesn’t much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else.” (Samuel Rogers)

v. “Teaching physics without calculus or research psychology without statistics is teaching about science rather than teaching science.” (Victoria Hart)

vi. The problem with separating science and math is that science NEEDS math. Math, however, does not need science.” (-ll-)

vii. “Seek not to know who said this or that, but take note of what has been said.” (Thomas á Kempis)

viii. “What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties.” (William Hepworth Thompson)

ix. “Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.” (Dion Boucicault)

x. “No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good.” (Mandell Creighton)

xi. “To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him—two.” (Norman Douglas)

xii. “Science is special because there is no ancient wisdom. The ancients were fools, by and large. I mean no disrespect, but if you wish to design a rifle by Aristotelian principles, or treat an illness via the Galenic system, you are a fool, following foolishness. Science is the true ladder to heaven, anyone who has practiced it can not be help be amazed by its miraculous powers of prediction. [...] Knowledge is hard. We, as individual humans are stupid. Science is sloppy and noisy. But science got us to the moon, and science gave is antibiotics.” (Razib Khan)

xiii. All political persuasions are a mix of norms and assumptions about the way the world is arranged. When you make false assertion about the nature of things, you will make worthless inferences. [...] Note that any assumption of what is does not here necessarily entail what ought to be. But it is much easier to achieve an ought if you accurately characterize the is.” (-ll-)

xiv. “In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.” (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius)

xv. “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.” (Jean de La Fontaine)

xvi. “Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.” (-ll-)

xvii. “It is the common vice of all, in old age, to be too intent upon our interests.” (Terence)

Quotes

i. “One is easily fooled by that which one loves.” (On est aisément dupé par ce qu’on aime. Molière)

ii. “The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; It is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.” (Plus on aime quelqu’un, moins il faut qu’on le flatte: À rien pardonner le pur amour éclate. -ll-)

iii. “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” (Un sot savant est sot plus qu’un sot ignorant. -ll-)

iv. “the hatred that one has for oneself is probably the one for which there is no forgiveness.” (Georges Bernanos)

v. “We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.” (Charles Caleb Colton)

vi. “Many a man may thank his talent for his rank, but no man has ever been able to return the compliment by thanking his rank for his talent.” (-ll-)

vii. Imitation is the sincerest of flattery. (-ll-)

viii. “When you have nothing to say, say nothing; a weak defense strengthens your opponent, and silence is less injurious than a bad reply.” (-ll-)

ix. “Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion. [...]

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. [...] Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.” (George Eliot)

x. “There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.” (-ll-)

xi. “One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.” (-ll-)

xii. “Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.” (-ll-)

xiii. “Suicide is another thing that’s so frowned upon in this society, but honestly, life isn’t for everybody. It really isn’t. It’s sad when kids kill themselves ’cause they didn’t really give it a chance, but life is like a movie: if you’ve sat through more than half of it and it sucked every second so far, it probably isn’t gonna get great right at the very end for you and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early.” (Doug Stanhope)

xiv. “Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.” (Marcial)

xv. “Whoever makes great presents, expects great presents in return.” (Quisquis magna dedit, voluit sibi magna remitti. -ll-)

xvi. “An ordinary human being, with a personal conscience, personally answering for something to somebody and personally and directly taking responsibility, seems to be receding farther and farther from the realm of politics. Politicians seem to turn into puppets that only look human and move in a giant, rather inhuman theatre; they appear to become merely cogs in a huge machine, objects of a major civilizational automatism which has gotten out of control and for which nobody is responsible.” (Václav Havel)

xvii. “We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.” (Quintilian)

xviii. “Reason and love are sworn enemies.” (La raison et l’amour sont ennemis jurés. Pierre Corneille)

xix. “Desire increases when fulfillment is postponed.” (Le désir s’accroît quand l’effet se recule. -ll-)

xx. “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long; but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.” (Charles Darwin, quote from Phantoms in the brain)

Quotes

i. “The world would be in better shape if people would take the same pains in the practice of the simplest moral laws as they exert in intellectualizing over the most subtle moral questions.” (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)

ii. “It is difficult to see the person who admires us as stupid.” (-ll-)

iii. “Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.” (-ll-)

iv. “One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated.” (-ll-)

v. “Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom.” (-ll-)

vi. “He that knows little often repeats it.” (Thomas Fuller)

vii. “The Greeks and Carthaginians interacted closely with the Iberian peoples. The result was the emergence of a civilization that achieved a high level in the fine arts, built towns of a reasonable size and adopted writing. Iberian civilization has received little attention outside Spain, yet the Iberians reached a level of sophistication surpassed among native peoples of the western Mediterranean only by the Etruscans.” (‘Who knew?’ I certainly didn’t. From David Abulafia’s The Great Sea)

viii. “The most certain way to hide from others the limits of our knowledge is not to go beyond them.” (Leopardi)

ix. “Men are not to be judged by what they do not know, but by what they do know, and the manner in which they know it.” (Vauvenargues)

x. “That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.” (Hazlitt)

xi. “The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” (C. S. Lewis)

xii. “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” (Chesterton)

xiii. “To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; as it is, the mere act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.” (Schopenhauer)

xiv. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” (George Orwell)

xv. “Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.” (Auden)

xvi. “Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.” (Henry de Montherlant)

xvii. “Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.” (Thomas Szasz)

xviii. “Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.” (-ll-)

xix. “Whoever in middle age attempts to realize the hopes and wishes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.” (Goethe. Related link.)

xx. “We are afraid of the old age which we may never attain.” (Jean de La Bruyère)

Quotes

i. “Folly is often more cruel in the consequence than malice can be in the intent.” (Marquess of Halifax)

ii. “Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.” (-ll-)

iii. “A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.” (Norman Douglas)

iv. “People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.” (Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes. In slightly related matters, I’ve been meaning to link to this for a while and I guess this is as good a place as any to do it.)

v. “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.” (Descartes)

vi. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” (Daniel Kahneman)

vii. “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.” (Benjamin Disraeli. Here’s the cartoon version.)

viii. “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristiscs of a vigorous intellect.” (Samuel Johnson)

ix. “The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.” (Santayana)

x. “There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up unfashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.” (Bertrand Russell)

xi. “The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.” (-ll-)

xii. “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” (Nietzsche)

xiii. “Faith makes many of the mountains which it has to remove.” (W. R. Inge)

xiv. “To praise oneself is considered improper, immodest; to praise one’s own sect, one’s own philosophy, is considered the highest duty.” (Leo Shestov)

xv. “I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, That the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that the doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.” (Thomas Hobbes)

xvi. “Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.” (Thomas Henry Huxley)

xvii. “Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.” (William Hazlitt)

xviii. “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” (Pascal)

xix. “we cannot simply presume that we know instinctively why people do what they do no matter how emotionally satisfying that may be, because humans are often generally unaware of the reasons for their thoughts and actions in the first place. [...] In most cases, our thoughts and actions simply make sense at the time.” (D. Jason Slone)

xx. “I think you can come across as kind of rude. [...] arrogant and pretentious [...] You can add patronising to the list.” (a girl I talked to yesterday. I’m of course quoting her out of context. She’s quite nice and it was an interesting conversation.)

Quotes

i. “That’s another trouble with education as we now have it – it is for the young and people think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish that’s a rite of passage into manhood. [...] ‘I’ve finished with school, I’m no more a child’ – and therefore anything that reminds you of school; reading books, having ideas, asking questions – that’s kids’ stuff. Now you’re an adult you don’t do that sort of thing anymore.” [...] What’s wrong with it is you have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterwards of going back to learning.” [...] The trouble with learning is most people don’t enjoy it because of the circumstances. Make it possible for them to enjoy learning and they’ll keep it up” (Isaac Asimov. I’ve posted the Asimov discussion here on the blog before, but people may have missed it and I really liked this. In terms of the prevailing societal norms things have likely changed somewhat since then, but perhaps less than many people would like to think.)

ii. “We confess our faults in the plural, and deny them in the singular.” (Richard Fulke Greville)

iii. “is being stupid really a disadvantage? Frankly some of the most self-satisfied people I know are the stupid affluent. They are stupid enough that they can unreflectively enjoy their affluence. The correlation between income and intelligence is weak enough that there will be many stupid affluent and intelligent poor. The former are probably the happiest, and the latter the most miserable.” (Razib Khan)

iv. “If a friend tell thee a fault, imagine always that he telleth thee not the whole.” (Thomas Fuller)

v. “A fool’s paradise is a wise man’s hell.” (-ll-)

vi. “If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already by people wo do not know them.” (Chamfort)

vii. “The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.” (Solomon Ibn Gabirol)

viii. “Could we but enter into the hearts of mankind, and see the motives and springs that prompt them to the undertaking of many illustrious actions, we should very probably see fewer of them performed.” (anon.)

ix. “A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret.” (Sir Henry Taylor)

x. “The cruellest lies are often told in silence.” (Robert Louis Stevenson)

xi. “The chief use to which we put our love of the truth is in persuading ourselves that what we love is true.” (Pierre Nicole)

xii. “Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.” (John Dewey)

xiii. “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like; but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy, and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves.” (Francis Bacon. Related link.)

xiv. “There is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people’s weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities. If  a man has a mind to be thought wiser, and a woman handsomer than they really are, their error is a comfortable one to themselves, and an innocent one with regard to other people; and I would rather make them my friends, by indulging them in it, than my enemies, by endeavouring (and that to no purpose) to undeceive them.” (Lord Chesterfield. In case you feel the need to ask: No, I’m not sure if I agree with this sentiment.)

xv. “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” (Josh Billings)

xvi. “It is easier to say new things than to reconcile those which have already been said.” (Vauvenargues)

xvii. “To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.” (Tacitus)

xviii. “A fool always finds someone more foolish than he is to admire him.” (Boileau)

Quotes

i. “Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.” (Napoleon Bonaparte)

ii. “Different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other’s nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.” (Rebecca West)

iii. “There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.” (Francis Bacon)

iv. “If the first law of friendship is that it has to be cultivated, the second law is to be indulgent when the first law has been neglected.” (Voltaire)

v. “Personalize your sympathies; depersonalize your antipathies.” (W. R. Inge)

vi. “We spend our time envying people whom we wouldn’t wish to be.” (Jean Rostand)

vii. “Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die for each other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right moment.” (George Meredith)

viii. “Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weaknesses.” (Madame du Deffand)

ix. “Some women are not beautiful – they only look as though they are.” (Karl Kraus)

x. “Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.” (Hermann Hesse)

xi. “Many things cause pain which would cause pleasure if you regarded their advantages.” (B. Gracián)

xii. “‘There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’; and Nature has in that sense no ‘thinking’ outside man’s. He and his ethics stand alone.” (Charles Sherrington (+Shakespeare))

xiii. “The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.” (Montaigne)

xiv. “More men become good through practice than by nature.” (Democritus)

xv. “I think it is Franklin who says that philosophers are sages in their maxims and fools in their conduct but this is an everyday fact consonant with maxims – that human nature is ever capable of improvement and never able of being made perfect.” (John Clare)

xvi. “Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.” (Leopardi)

xvii. “Virtues and vices are of a strange nature; for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.” (anon.)

xviii. “Virtue is so praiseworthy that wicked people practise it from self-interest.” (Vauvenargues)

xix. “It is some kind of scandal not to bear with the faults of an honest man. It is not loving honesty enough to allow it distinguishing privileges.” (George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax)

xx. “Some people are thought well of in society whose only good points are the vices useful in social life.” (Rochefoucauld)

The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (2)

As I’m reading this book I’m trying not to read more than 50-60 pages/day; I feel that if one just reads a book like this in a day, not much will stick and one will not have given the quotes the thought at least some of them merit. Some more quotes from the book:

i. “However we may be reproached for our vanity we sometimes need to be assured of our merits and to have our most obvious advantages pointed out to us.” (Vauvenargues)

ii. “There are many things we despise in order that we may not have to despise ourselves.” (-ll-)

iii. “In order to live at peace with ourselves, we almost always disguise our impotence or weakness as calculated actions and systems, and so we satisfy that part of us which is observing the other.” (Benjamin Constant)

iv. “Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.” (Virginia Woolf)

v. “If your body were to be put at the disposal of a stranger, you would certainly be indignant. Then aren’t you ashamed of putting your mind at the disposal of chance acquaintance, by allowing yourself to be upset if he happens to abuse you?” (Epictetus)

vi. “Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.” (Gerald Brenan)

vii. “The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortunes, and willingly avoids the sight of distress.” (Somerset Maugham)

viii. “No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.” (Emerson)

ix. “Attributing our own temptations to others, we give them credit for victories they have never won.” (Elizabeth Bibesco)

x. “We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the wold, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.” (Pascal)

xi. “The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.” (Bertrand Russell)

xii. “Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather for how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.” (Thomas Szasz)

xiii. “Knowledge may give people weight, but accomplishments add lustre, and many more people see than weigh.” (Lord Chesterfield)

xiv. “The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.” (Napoleon Bonaparte)

xv. “What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.” (Bernard Shaw)

xvi. “We often make people pay dearly for what we think we give them.” (Comtesse Diane de Beausacq)

xvii. “The lazy are always wanting to do something.” (Vauvenargues)

xviii. “Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon, it has such a sturdy constitution, that it is readily regarded as something natural even by its victims.” (Marcel Aymé)

xix. “The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice.” (Jules Renard)

xx. “Many priceless things can be bought.” (Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach)

xxi. “A ‘sound’ banker, alas, is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.” (John Maynard Keynes)

xxii. “The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.” (Norman Douglas)

…

This may be my last post about the book as it would make sense to save some of the good stuff for my regular ‘quotes posts‘. If it does turn out to be my last post about the book: I recommend it.

The Oxford Book of Aphorisms

I’m currently reading this. I’ve seen many of the quotes included in the book before, but there’s also a lot of new stuff. All of the quotes posted below are quotes which I’ve not posted here on the blog before:

i. “All religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.” (Schopenhauer)

ii. “Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so. It is not so. It is so. It is not so.” (Benjamin Franklin)

iii. “Contempt for human nature is an error of human reason.” (Vauvenargues)

iv. “It is a folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.” (Richard Whately)

v. “Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act out our part in it.” (Swift)

vi. “The shortness of life can neither dissuade us from its pleasures, nor console us for its pains.” (Vauvenargues)

vii. “The things we are best acquainted with are often the things we lack. This is because we have spent so much time thinking of them.” (Gerald Brenan)

viii. “What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to the knowledge of it without difficulty, and without any stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded.” (Hume)

ix. “The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.” (Anatole France)

x. “It is easy to fly into a passion – anybody can do that – but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way – that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.” (Aristotle)

xi. “Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.” (T. S. Eliot)

xii. “‘The individual’ is an idea like other ideas.” (Harold Rosenberg. Related link.)

xiii. “An imaginative man is apt to see, in his life, the story of his life; and is thereby led to conduct himself in life in such a manner as to make a good story of it rather than a good life.” (Sir Henry Taylor)

xiv. “One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.” (Oscar Wilde)

xv. “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.” (Thomas Szasz)

xvi. “We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.” (Thoreau)

xvii. “We lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.” (Proust)

xviii. “If we happen to be praised on account of qualities which we formerly despised, our estimation of those qualities immediately rises.” (Leopardi)

xix. “We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.” (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)

xx. “There is false modesty, but there is no false pride.” (Jules Renard)

xxi. “To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.” (Elizabeth Bibesco)

Quotes

i. “Example is always more efficacious than precept.” (Samuel Johnson)

ii. “Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.” (-ll-)

iii. “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.” (-ll-)

iv. “It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.” (-ll-. Modern medicine has arguably made this quote less true today than it was.)

v. “Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.” (-ll-)

vi. “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.” (-ll-)

vii. “Cations that have similar coordination numbers and similar ionic radii tend to substitute for each other and make mixed compounds that we call solid solutions, which are analogous in every way to common liquid solutions. Natural olivines are solid solutions of variable amounts of iron and magnesium silicates. The pure magnesium olivine is Mg₂SiO₄, forsterite; the pure iron olivine is Fe₂SiO₄, fayalite.” (from Earth, p.64. I primarily included this quote here as a sort of very brief explanation for why I probably will not quote very much from this book. I’ve read the first 4 chapters (100 pages) so far.)

viii. “I am skeptical when someone says that a biological genetic grouping corroborates a historical linguistic grouping or vice versa for a simple reason: genetic material and language are transmitted by different mechanisms (I’ll skip my usual joke about this), so in principle a one-to-one correspondence should be surprising.” (Bruce Mannheim, via Razib Khan)

ix. “That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel.” (Oliver Goldsmith)

x. “A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.” (Otto von Bismarck)

xi. “The happier the time, the quicker it passes.” (Pliny the Younger – the original quote in Latin: “Tanto brevius omne, quanto felicius tempus”)

xii. “With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose; for good books are as scarce as good companions.” (Charles Caleb Colton)

xiii. “Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.” (-ll-)

xiv. “Hunger is sharper than the sword.” (Beaumont and Fletcher)

xv. “The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized. [...] it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.” (Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the next War (1911))

xvi. “By the laws of England, by the laws of Christianity, and by the constitution of society, when there is a difference of opinion between husband and wife, it is the duty of the wife to submit to the husband.” (wikiquote provides the following source for the quote: Molina, V.-C., In re Agar-Ellis; Agar-Ellis v. Lascelles (1878), L. R. 10 C. D. 55.)

xvii. “No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.” (Cesare Pavese)

xviii. “All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.” (-ll-)

xix. “Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.”

Quotes

i. “Hope is a waking dream.” (Aristotle)

ii. “Nobody talks much that doesn’t say unwise things, — things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

iii. “Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?”

iv. “Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.)

v.  “I have neither a building nor a vase nor a costly robe nor a high-priced slave or slave-girl. If there is something I have to use, I use it. If there is not, I do without. [...] They blame me because I do without so many things. But I blame them because they are unable to do without.” (Cato the Censor. The quote is from The Classical World, p.333).

vi. “We go and fancy that everybody is thinking of us. But he is not: he is like us; he is thinking of himself.” (Charles Reade)

vii. “The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble.” (-ll-)

viii. ” There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.” (William Hazlitt)

ix. “Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.” (-ll-)

x. “We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.” (-ll-)

xi. “I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.” (-ll-)

xii. “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.” (-ll-)

xiii. “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” (Goethe)

xiv. ” He who praises everybody praises nobody.” (Samuel Johnson)

xv. “I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.” (-ll-)

xvi. “He that would pass the latter part of life with honour and decency, must, when he is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.” (-ll-)

xvii. “In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.” (-ll-)

xviii. “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.” (-ll-)

xix. “the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words. ” (-ll-)

xx. “He that talkes much of his happinesse summons griefe.” (George Herbert)

xxi. “None knows the weight of another’s burthen.” (-ll-)

xxii. “Life is halfe spent before we know what it is.” (-ll-)

xxiii. “The love of money and the love of learning rarely meet.” (-ll-)

Quotes

i. “Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.” (James Mackintosh)

ii. “In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

iii. “If I belong to any tradition, then it is the tradition which makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do; and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.” (Alfred Brendel)

iv. “People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.” (Honoré de Balzac)

v. “If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table — a fool’s notion of history.” (-ll-)

vi. “Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings. (L’étude prête une sorte de magie à tout ce qui nous environne.)” (-ll-)

vii. “One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.” (Walter Bagehot)

viii. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor… Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other men’s words, to follow other men’s habits.” (-ll-)

ix. “It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.” (-ll-)

x. “There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. ” (Richard Feynman)

xi. “Don’t you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don’t you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out “Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Yes”, I said. “I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”" (Isaac Asimov)

xii. “Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.” (Oscar Levant)

xiii. “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty…” (Franz Stangl, SS-Hauptsturmführer and commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps)

xiv. “Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.” (William James)

xv. “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” (-ll-)

xvi. “The way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange and foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the group) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.” (John Dewey)

xvii. “Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.” (-ll-)

xviii. “”Knowledge,” in the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it is treated as an end in itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored their “minds” with all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. They have no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead static level.” (-ll-)

xix. “The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation.” (-ll-)

Hogfather

…by Terry Pratchett. I  read a few hours yesterday and then completed it today. I’d forgotten how fast you go through books like these, compared to textbooks; I got so curious after a bit of reading that I decided to time myself, and my best estimate – based on 5 hours of reading – is that on average I read about 60 pages an hour, or one page/minute. So the fact that it will take you ‘a long time’ to read this book is no excuse for not reading it, because it simply won’t (but don’t start out with this one if you’ve never read Pratchett before).

Some quotes from the book:

“The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.
There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.
‘And there’s the sign, Ridcully,’ said the Dean. ‘You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says “Do not, under any circumstances, open this door”?’
‘Of course I’ve read it,’ said Ridcully. ‘Why d’yer think I want it opened?’
‘Er … why?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘To see why they wanted it shut, of course.’*
[*This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.]“
…
“Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. [...] The members of the Guild of Assassins considered themselves cultured men who enjoyed good music and food and literature. And they knew the value of human life. To a penny, in many cases. [...] Anyone could buy the services of the Guild. Several zombies had, in the past, employed the Guild to settle scores with their murderers. In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practised the ultimate democracy. You didn’t need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people.”
…
“There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like ‘disembowelled’ in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it.”
…
“‘There used to be warning signs up,’ said the neat voice from behind. ‘Yeah, well, warning signs in Ankh-Morpork might as well have “Good Firewood” written on them’”.
…
“Susan didn’t like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being normal got too much. Biers, despite the smell and the drink and the company, had one important virtue. In Biers nobody took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was traditionally supposed to be a time for families but the people who drank in Biers probably didn’t have families; some of them looked as though they might have had litters, or clutches. Some of them looked as though they’d probably eaten their relatives, or at least someone‘s relatives.
Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn’t mix a metaphor.”
…
[when reading this, think of the Hogfather as Discworld's Santa Claus...]
“‘This is a shop,’ said Mr Crumley, finally getting to the root of the problem. ‘We do not give Merchandise away. How can we expect people to buy things if some Person is giving them away? Now please go and get him out of here.’
‘Arrest the Hogfather, style of thing?’
‘Yes!’
‘On Hogswatchnight?’
‘Yes!’
‘In your shop?’
‘Yes!’
‘In front of all those kiddies?’
‘Y—’ Mr Crumley hesitated. To his horror, he realized that Corporal Nobbs, against all expectation, had a point.”
…
“The Archchancellor pointed dramatically skywards. ‘To the laundry!’ he said. ‘It’s downstairs, Ridcully,’ said the Dean. ‘Down to the laundry!’ ‘And you know Mrs Whitlow doesn’t like us going in there,’ said the chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘And who is Archchancellor of this University, may I ask?’ said Ridcully. ‘Is it Mrs Whitlow? I don’t think so! Is it me? Why, how amazing, I do believe it is!’ ‘Yes, but you know what she can be like,’ said the Chair. ‘Er, yes, that’s true—’ Ridcully began. ‘I believe she’s gone to her sister’s for the holiday,’ said the Bursar. ‘We certainly don’t have to take orders from any kind of housekeeper!’ said the Archchancellor. ‘To the laundry!’
The wizards surged out excitedly, leaving Susan, the oh god, the Verruca Gnome and the Hair Loss Fairy. ‘Tell me again who those people were,’ said the oh god. ‘Some of the cleverest men in the world,’ said Susan.
…
“I THINK I MUST TELL YOU SOMETHING, said Death. ‘Yes, I think you should,’ said Ridcully. ‘I’ve got little devils running round the place eating socks and pencils, earlier tonight we sobered up someone who thinks he’s a God of Hangovers and half my wizards are trying to cheer up the Cheerful Fairy. We thought something must’ve happened to the Hogfather. We were right, right?’
…
“‘I’m sure he wouldn’t keep on eating them if they were addictive,’ said the Senior Wrangler.”
…
“‘I really should talk to him, sir. He’s had a near-death experience!’ ‘We all have. It’s called “living”,’”
…

Lastly, a quote which also made it into the movie (even if in a somewhat abbreviated form):

A reminder

I mostly post this because people rarely click the links in my sidebar (blogroll etc.) and I think some of you may be missing out on good stuff. So I decided to post a few quotes from more or less random posts at Katja Grace’ blog here, to give you a sense of why I’ve put a link to her blog on my blogroll. Some of her ideas I consider plain weird, but there’s a lot of good stuff too:

i. “people are uncomfortable comparing their friends and partners with others they might have had instead, and in the absence of comparison most people think those they love are pretty good. You rarely hear ‘there are likely about half a billion wives I would like more than you out there, but you are the one I’m arbitrarily in love with’.

This all makes evolutionary sense; blind loyalty is better than ongoing evaluation from an ally, at least towards you. So you evaluate people accurately for a bit, then commit to the good ones. Notice that here the motivation for not comparing appears to come from the benefits of committing to people without regret, rather than the difficulty of figuring out what a nice bottom is worth next to a good career.” (from Experiences are friends)

ii. “When we don’t have concepts for things, we can hardly think about them. When I learn new concepts, I often notice them applying everywhere where before I didn’t even notice anything missing. [...] We don’t invent our own concepts very much; we mostly inherit them from our society. How many concepts that you have did you invent? If it is very few, this is probably not just because society has already found all the useful concepts and given them to you. If you lived a thousand years ago, my guess is that society wouldn’t have given you concepts like ‘subjective probability’ or ‘tragedy of the commons’ or ‘computation’. And no matter how nerdy you are, you probably wouldn’t have made them up. After all, a whole bunch of people did live then, and they didn’t make them up. [...]

Hypothesis: We have relatively few concepts for the world inside our heads, because it’s not very shared, and we get concepts mostly from other people. This means it is hard to think about the world inside our heads, and so also hard to remember. (This is all relative to the world outside our heads, and relative to how we would be if we could show one another inside our heads more).” (from Are we infantile introspectors)

iii. “Why are aphorisms cynical more often than books are for instance?

A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.” (from Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together?)

iv. “Imagine you were aiming to appear to care about something or somebody else. One way you could do it is to work out exactly what would help them and do that. What could possibly look like you care about them more? The first problem here is that onlookers might not know what is really helpful, especially if you had to do any work to figure it out. So they won’t recognize your actions as being it. You would do better to do something that most people believe would be helpful than something that you know would.

Another problem arises if everyone knows the thing is helpful to others, but they also know that you could do the same thing to help yourself. From their perspective, you are probably helping yourself. Here you can solve both problems at once by just doing something that credibly doesn’t help you. People will assume there is some purpose, and if it’s not self serving it’s probably for someone else. You can demonstrate care better with actions which are obviously useless to you and plausibly useful to someone else than actions plausibly useful to you and obviously useful to someone else. Fasting to raise awareness for the hungry looks more sincere than eating to raise money for the hungry.” (from Being useless to express care)

v. “One way to be more satisfied with life is to lower your standards. People seem pretty hesitant to do this most of the time. And fair enough: who wants to be satisfied at the expense of everything else they care about? Happiness isn’t that great.

If only it were possible to feel like you had lower standards without actually settling for the very easiest career that would pay for your tent, noodles, and blow up companion.

I wonder if this is a significant reason people drink alcohol.

It seems that when people drink they lower their standards for many things. For what to laugh at, for what’s worth saying, and for who it’s worth saying to, for instance. They enthusiastically eat things they would find barely passable sober, and are thrilled by activities they usually find beneath them.

Yet this standard lowering is constrained in time, so as long as you don’t become permanently intoxicated you can spend most of your days having high standards. And since there was a specific identifiable reason for your low standards (even if purely social), it need not contaminate your image as a discerning person. At least not as much.

Is this an actual common point of drinking, or just a side effect? I don’t know – I don’t drink enough, and apparently this isn’t considered a good topic of party conversation.” (from Drinking to lower standards?)

 

Dating advice (not from me)

Given that the person who wrote the post to which I’m linking did not manage to convince me to change my mind about this even after a relatively long discussion earlier today, the advice will probably not be of much relevance to me, at least not if I’m successful. But maybe you’ll be able to make use of it, and even if you’re not dating some of it can also be applied in other social contexts as well (link):

“If you want my opinion, I think everything can actually be very simple (though perhaps I’ll be disillusioned once I become more acquainted with the dating scene). You can pare things down to just a few friendly maxims; they don’t have to be so complicated. Now, please brace yourself for some hackneyed words of ‘wisdom’, coming from yours truly:

If you want to appear totally awesome in front of someone for whom you have non-platonic feelings, then just strive to be awesome at all times. If you want to be able to engage in meaningful and intelligent conversations, then just cultivate a habit to read more, watch more news and documentaries, ask more meaningful questions and learn more. If you want to show how attuned and sensitive you are to artistic endeavours and perspectives, then just open your eyes wider and try to seek beauty in all the corners of your everyday life. If you want to establish yourself as a connoisseur of the good things in life, it would be ideal to start being more appreciative of the little luxuries you enjoy. If you want to portray yourself as a thoughtful and patient person, then just keep reminding yourself to distribute more kindness to others whenever possible, and to be more empathetic towards other people’s suffering. If you want to exuberate confidence, then just try your very best to develop the courage to stand up for your own principles when necessary, and to have more self-esteem. In daily life you should always aim for perfection, so that you don’t have to go through any charade when you are hanging out with someone in whom you are interested.

Being intellectual isn’t about going to great lengths to find out the other party’s areas of interest and then to read up furiously on the relevant subjects so that you can regurgitate everything during your conservations. Being artistic isn’t about memorising all the names of famous artists and masterpieces without being able to be sincerely moved by the ingenuity and emotions that went into the creative processes involved in crafting these works. Being caring isn’t about being chivalrous, and neither is being polite about dining in a certain fashion. Being confident isn’t about employing your diaphragm when speaking, or about moving in a deliberately slow and smooth motion. Being attractive isn’t about following hard-and-fast rules. Falling in love isn’t about losing your own individuality; it is about being accepted for who you are, it is about being a better person for your partner. (Yes, I sound so clichéd, I know.)

If you think I make more sense than Dr Philanderer, then just keep these in mind: 1) Extend your efforts to be brilliant to every single part of your life, such that you eventually internalise all these amazing qualities, such that they naturally come to form your character; and 2) don’t try too hard to impress, because it is revolting.”

I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have met and become a friend of the author of the words above, and I consider it highly unlikely that this is the last quote I’ll post from that site.