Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[WT Sharpe]

.....More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
..........— Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Konigsberg; 1935 - ), American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author.. Side Effects, "My Speech to the Graduates."

[kennyc]

Gotta love anyone named Woody!

Allen, Guthrie, Woodpecker!

[WT Sharpe]

Never cared for that woodpecker. He was a mean old bird.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Never cared for that woodpecker. He was too mean.

You had to love his laugh though. Surely?

[WT Sharpe]

His laugh was the only thing I did like about him. He was cruel.

[astrangerhere]

"She was written in a different language."
-Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

[BenG]

"A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life."
-- Henry Ward Beecher, Eyes and Ears

[WT Sharpe]

.....I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
..........— Alice Walker (1944 - ), American poet. The Color Purple (1982).

[dreams]

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them." —Charles Caleb Colton


"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book." —Dwight D. Eisenhower

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by dreams

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them." —Charles Caleb Colton


"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book." —Dwight D. Eisenhower

Love those. The first comes from his Lacon or Many things in few words: addressed to those who think, Volume I, published either in 1820 or 1825 (my sources conflict), but a complete edition containing all the volumes was published in 1837 in London by Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, Paternoster-Row.

The second can be found on page 275 of Mandate for Change by Dwight D. Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963).

[poohbear_nc]

My heart was more disgraceful, more alone
And more courageous than the world has known.
O passer-by my heart was like your own.

Violet (Keppel) Trefusis

[BenG]

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
--William Morris, "The Beauty of Life," a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design (19 February 1880), later published in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878 - 1881 (1882)

[WT Sharpe]

.....Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our 'direct' experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly—we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them. We realists take the view that reality is out there: objective, physical and independent of what we believe about it. But we never experience that reality directly. Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge—including our knowledge of the non-physical worlds of logic, mathematics and philosophy, and of imagination, fiction, art and fantasy—is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain's own virtual-reality generator. So it is not just science—reasoning about the physical world—that involves virtual reality. All reasoning, all thinking and all external experience are forms of virtual reality.
..........— David Elieser Deutsch (1953 - ), Israeli-British physicist. Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications (Penguin, 1998), pages 120-121.

[SandyHarper]

"Be kind to unkind people; they probably need it the most."

[WT Sharpe]

.....These benefits, of course, explain why society has placed such emphasis on science and given such a high priority to verification as a means of knowing.
.....This priority was captured very well in a famous anecdote. The semanticist Wendell Johnson in the early part of the 20th century, noting that one of the great medieval disputes was over the question, 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin,' answered it by saying, "Bring me the pin and bring me the angels and we'll see."
..........— David Zarefsky (1946 - ), American communication scholar and professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Quoted from his "Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition" course for The Teaching Company.