Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny"? "Make yourself at home"? "Marry my daughter"? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.

Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles

[WT Sharpe]

.....If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did: never, when asked one's country, to answer, "I am an Athenian or a Corinthian," but "I am a citizen of the world."
..........— Epictetus (55 C.E. – 135 C.E.), Greek Stoic philosopher, born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey). The Golden Sayings, XV.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did: never, when asked one's country, to answer, "I am an Athenian or a Corinthian," but "I am a citizen of the world."
..........— Epictetus (55 C.E. – 135 C.E.), Greek Stoic philosopher, born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey). The Golden Sayings, XV.

So very apt for MR members!

[WT Sharpe]

.....Earth has its boundaries but human stupidity is limitless.
..........— Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist. Letter to Maupassant, October 26, 1871. Quoted in The Great Quotations (1961) by George Seldes.

[kennyc]

To this I agree!

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

So very apt for MR members!

eh ? What ....


we are all wrist watches .....

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

eh ? What ....


we are all wrist watches .....

Nah, we're all tools.

[WT Sharpe]

.....So Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it’s just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it’s because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is equivalent to the "Dirac sea," mentioned earlier, but it is simpler, and it is the explanation currently accepted today.)
..........— Michio Kaku (1947 - ), American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (2008).

.....Now let’s say we have a lump of antimatter and it collides with ordinary matter, creating a huge explosion. There are now trillions of electrons and trillions of antielectrons being annihilated. But if we reversed the direction of the arrow for the antielectron, turning it into an electron going backward in time, this would mean that the same electron went zigzagging backward and forward trillions of times. There was a further curious result: there must be just one electron in the lump of matter. The same electron went whizzing back and forth, zigzagging in time. Each time it did a U-turn in time it became antimatter. But if it did another U-turn in time then it turned into another electron. (With his thesis adviser, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron’s journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it would explain a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. In physics you cannot label electrons. There are no green electrons or Johnny electrons. Electrons have no individuality. You cannot “tag” an electron, like scientists sometimes tag animals in the wild to study them. Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.)
..........— ibid.

[WT Sharpe]

.....When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
..........— William Hazlitt (1778-1830), English essayist, critic. "The Spirit of Controversy," The Atlas magazine (January 31, 1830), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Volume Twelve (1904).

[kennyc]

Very interesting quote and I think very true!

[Paegan2246]

I found this in a book I was reading this weekend:
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. ~ Jean Luc Picard - Captain UFS Enterprise

[kennyc]

Thanks for that Paegan2246

I tend to disagree with it, but definitely see that as a perspective on life.

[Paegan2246]

I agree and I don't...when speaking of family or children, I would disagree. But when it comes to material things, I would most definitely agree

[kennyc]

Definitely important to cherish life and to live a good one.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
..........— William Hazlitt (1778-1830), English essayist, critic. "The Spirit of Controversy," The Atlas magazine (January 31, 1830), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Volume Twelve (1904).

Originally Posted by kennyc

Very interesting quote and I think very true!

I also agree, although from time to time I post quotations and excerpts with which I disagree but consider post-worthy by virtue of being thought-provoking. The best example of someone who did this in a book of quotations was George Seldes with his The Great Quotations (1961). As I recall (I don't have the book before me, and—crime against humanity that it is—neither the book or it's update The Great Thoughts (1985) are available as ebooks), in the Preface, Seldes defined "great" quotations as being those that impacted society in significant ways for either good or ill; thus a great quotation is not necessarily a good quotation from a moral perspective.