Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

- Yogi Berra (3/12/25 - 9/22/2015)

[covingtoncat73]

"Summer was gone and the heat died down
And Autumn reached for her golden crown"

Nick Drake, "Time of No Reply"

“Change, real change was on the horizon, close enough to ignite hope but far enough away to increase frustration. For all the successes of the 1960's, Negroes were excluded from real equality.” . . . “in many ways the Northern style of discrimination—subtle, unpublicized, and deep-rooted—was even tougher to break.”

- Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point, Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969.

Quote and citation taken from a book I am currently reading; 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture & the Shaping of a Generation
by Charles Kaiser

[covingtoncat73]

“Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.” (All [hours] wound, the last kills.)
-Old saying on Roman clocks, popularized by Neil Gaiman in American Gods.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

- Yogi Berra (3/12/25 - 9/22/2015)

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler"
Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken

In some ways, Yogi said it better

[kennyc]

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (9/24/1896 - 12/21/1940)

[kennyc]

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

[covingtoncat73]

"You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy."
—William Faulkner, interview in Writers at Work, 1958 (it is his birthday today)

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I saw him in Saskatoon when he was 79. A joy to watch him perform.

I bet. How wonderful!

"If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations."

—E. O. Wilson

[WT Sharpe]

Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess.
— René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher. Discourse on the Method, pt. I (1637).

[WT Sharpe]

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
— Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), English essayist and critic. “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (I839).

[WT Sharpe]

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.
— Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925-1990), U.S. entertainer, jazz singer, and member of the "Rat Pack". Yes I Can, pt. 3, ch. 23 (I965).

(Guess who just got a new OCR scanner app for his iPad?)

[WT Sharpe]

And one last one for the night. This one comes not from an OCR scan, but from an old My Clippings Kindle file from the first ebook I ever read on a dedicated ereader back in 2009.

---

So strong are electromagnetic forces that a child's magnet easily lifts a paper clip off a tabletop in spite of Earth's formidable gravitational tug. Want a more interesting example? If you managed to extricate all the electrons from a cubic millimeter of atoms in the nose of the space shuttle, and if you affixed them all to the base of the launchpad, then the attractive force would inhibit the launch. All engines would fire and the shuttle wouldn't budge. And if the Apollo astronauts had brought back to Earth all electrons from a thimbleful of lunar dust (while leaving behind on the Moon the atoms from which they came), then their force of attraction would exceed the gravitational attraction between Earth and the Moon in its orbit.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958- ), American Astrophysicist. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.

[wayspooled]

“It was a piece of advice only, and aimed at myself as much, I suppose, as at you.— For those of easy tongues, she said. Remember, some live all their lives without discovering this truth; that the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Queens' Play