Quotation Bricolage; or, Whimsical Cherrypicking
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” ~ Andre Gide
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” ~ H.G. Wells
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” ~ Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.” ~ Albert Camus
“Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, “Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?” …Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, “We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.” ~ Charles M. Schulz
“Il est bien malaisé … d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.”
(It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.) ~ Voltaire, Le Diner Du Comte de Boulainvilliers
“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” ~ Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” ~ Alan Watts
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.” ~ Richard P. Feynman
“Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit Will Travel
“It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.” ~ Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
“Are my stories true, you ask? No, they are imaginary tales, containing fantastic characters and events. In real life, a family doesn’t have a child who looks like a mouse; in real life, a spider doesn’t spin words in her web. In real life, a swan doesn’t blow a trumpet. But real life is only one kind of life — there is also the life of the imagination. And although my stories are imaginary, I like to think that there is some truth in them, too — truth about the way people and animals feel and think and act. Yours sincerely, E. B. White”
“I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.” ~ E.B. White
“A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet may crack a joke that will take hold.” ~ E.B. White
“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
“We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.” ~ Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
“Those who are without compassion cannot see what is seen with the eyes of compassion.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
“When you’re in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That’s the consolation of philosophy.” ~ David Cronenberg
“I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.” ~ Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
