Tag: quote
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Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside…
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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be…
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It was on this day, during this terrible and wonderful run, that a thought occurred to me, a thought which has never left me: I’ve always considered the question to be ‘Why am I alive? Why am I here? What’s the point of me?’ And to that I say: Who cares! Forget the why… I…
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Concern for the soul is faulted for making us disregard the body, neglect our responsibilities to the Earth, and deny our kinship with other life forms. We share 90 percent of our genes with mice. Even the lowliest bacterium is our cousin. Why do we persist in imagining that there is some fifth essence in…
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You — as a human being — grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree. Alan Watts on the nature of consciousness
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Technology vs Objectivity
Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices – TV, jets, freeways and so on – but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes…
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I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home…
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I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to—I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting…
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Turning your phone off at the door is the new taking your shoes off at the door. Clayton Cubitt
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I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see / And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes I like these lyrics.
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Good design is seldom accepted. It has to be sold. Julius Shulman
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When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it…
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If you have goals in life, you’re probably going to need some sort of organization. Even if it’s an organization of just you, it’s still helpful to think of it as a kind of machine. You don’t need to do every part of the process yourself — you just need to set up the machine…
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This thing here, every man in the world goes through. / But fuck that, I put a lotta money up, I’m hatin’! Dennis Coles laments a failed romance.
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“A revealing way of describing science fiction is to say that it is part of a literary mode which one may call ‘fabril’*. ‘Fabril’ is the opposite of ‘pastoral’. But while the pastoral is an established and much discussed literary mode, recognized as such since early antiquity, its dark opposite has not yet been accepted,…