Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

“Call me Ishmael.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale....

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

"Admiral, there be whales here!" --- Scotty to Adm Kirk (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

....."Coming up next; a WHALE of a tale!"
..........— Every damned news anchor in the damn world since the beginning of damned time introducing every damned news story with a damn whale in it ever.

[Apache]

Not a quote, but a poem I have always liked.

Arthur Chapman, Western Poet
No loopholes now are framing
Lean faces, grim and brown;
No more keen eyes are aiming
To bring the redskin down.
The plough team's trappings jingle
Across the furrowed field,
And sounds domestic mingle
Where valor hung its shield.
But every wind careering
Seems here to breathe a song--
A song of brave frontiering--
A saga of the strong.

Apache

[kennyc]

Today is Lewis Thomas' Birthday -- he's one of my favorite Science Essay writers -- "Lives of a Cell" is an incredible book. It's a bit dated (cold war times) but definitely worth a read!

“It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science

“My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

[kennyc]

“Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.”
― Bill Nye (born on this day 11/27/1955) [ just a young whipper-snapper! ]

[HomeInMyShoes]

"And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions." Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

[kennyc]

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
- Nelson Mandela

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Free...nelson+mandela

[BenG]

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"

I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.

Charles Bukowski: a song with no end

[covingtoncat73]

"I am haunted by humans." Death in The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

[BenG]

"Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?"

Groucho Marx

[kennyc]

What a grouch!

[covingtoncat73]

“In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That's the spirit of Christmas yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho.”


― Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

[taosaur]

"In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue."

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

[kennyc]

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
- Mark Twain

A couple of quotes from Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 - December 10, 1968).


“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”

[WT Sharpe]

.....Good English, well spoken and well written, will open more doors for you than a college degree. Bad English, poorly spoken and poorly written, will slam doors that you don't even know exist.
..........— William Raspberry (1935 – 2012), Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. From a 1994 speech to honor students at Dillard University in New Orleans.