Tag: quote

And one last time

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential — for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never. —Søren Kierkegaard Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. —John Maynard Keynes… Read more →

And Again

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering. —Thomas Merton Life is thick sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through. The longer… Read more →

Commonplaces

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. —Edgar Allen Poe Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. —John Locke, Of Reading Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and… Read more →

SF Writers Say Smart Things: Scalzi on Context

Whatever » From the “People This Lacking in Self-Awareness Really Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Speak in Public Ever Again” Files But, you know what, there’s “graduate from good schools and work hard in public service” elite, and then there’s “make millions in corporate America and marry into the family that owned the mortgage on Europe” elite. Those are two entirely… Read more →

QOTD: Dorian on Wanted

(postmodernbarney.com) You see, there are dumb action movies, and then there are films that are so fundamentally insulting to your intelligence and so massively ill-conceived in theme and structure that you find yourself idly wondering just how good the blow was that the studio executives who green lit the film had to have been snorting. Read more →

Democracy Quote Of The Day

Hal Duncan speaking about the Stone of Scone: Personally, I think it should be ground up into dust and every single Scot given a piece of it as a sort of democratic fuck-you to mediaeval feudalism. The French had the right idea when it comes to inbred, porphyria-ridden, overblown celebrities. If you want tradition then bring back ritual regicide, I… Read more →

SF Authors Say Smart Things: John Shirley on ego

There’s a misunderstanding that the right-hand-path in spirituality, to use a short hand term, is about abasing or losing yourself or demolishing yourself. Not true at all. It’s simply about being in right relationship to the divine source of consciousness, and the Bodhisatvas who try to mitigate, and eventually end, the world’s suffering. But it’s not self annihilation. It’s more… Read more →

Eddington and the meta-paradigm

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures… Read more →

Hemmingway said some true things too

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer. —Hunter S. Thompson Read more →

One Damned Thing Over And Over

(This entire post pinched from Andrew Wheeler’s always entertaining blog. I don’t normally do that, but it’s too good, and a link won’t do.) A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land — an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this… Read more →

A late thought for May Day

During the heyday of what was billed as the Reagan Revolution, sometimes as the New American Dawn, or the “unfettered free market,” I could discover no common cause among the several degrees of of rightist separation (conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, reactionary, and evangelical) other than the moral lesson invariably found in their one and only cautionary tale: money ennobles rich people,… Read more →

Sentences to meditate on

Jonathan Carroll‘s never-emptying cornucopia of awesome brings us this quote today: I live near the abyss. I hope to stay. —Theodore Roethke Yes, I quite like that. A little bit Nietzsche, a little bit Billy Joel. It, at least to me, says something about an artistic way to live. Actually, and this is probably sharing too much, this brings to… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.