Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

Wait....purple urine....that's not normal???

[WT Sharpe]

....To Leibniz his nose was a congregation of spiritual beings
....To a modern physicist his nose is a wild dance of electrons
....To Bishop Berkeley his own nose only existed from time to time
.......when he blew it.
..........— Sir Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), English literary critic. Quoted in Helen Buss Mitchell, Roots of Wisdom: Speaking the Language of Philosophy (Wadsworth 1996), p. 237.

[WT Sharpe]

.....Fundamentalists always assume they know the mind of God. To their own children they will offer simple explanations of complex phenomena until the children are of an age where they are able to comprehend more completely, but they assume themselves to be on God's level, and thereby confuse the simple explanation one gives a child with the thing-in-itself.
..........— Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), English naturalist. The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition (1882).

[WT Sharpe]

.....There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
..........— Herman Melville (1819-1891), American novelist. Moby Dick (1851), Chapter XLIX: "The Hyena."

[FlorenceArt]

I can't resist quoting a paragraph from Ulysses, which I am currently reading and enjoying immensely.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Can't you just hear the dog and smell the sea?

[GeoffC]

yes the smell is obvious when the window is open and the wind is blowing our way ...


waht ... wait .... oh you mean visual imagery

[kennyc]

I'm reading The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley. These quotes are from the essay "Science and the Sense of the Holy"

"The whole of existence frightens me, from the smallest fly to the mystery of the incarnation, everything is unintelligible to me, most of all myself." -- Soren KierKefaard

"...the cell consists of matter ... composed chiefly of carbon with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulpher. These component parts, properly united produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nourished become man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Diety annuled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." -- Ernst Haeckel

"A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality of intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of high order." -- Albert Einstein

"whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in a shroud. -- Walt Whitman from Song of Myself

[BenG]

A little riff on corporate-speak from Connie Willis.

"All right, fellow workers," Management said. "Do you have your five objectives? Flip, would you collect them?"
Elaine looked stricken. Gina snatched the list from her and wrote rapidly:
1. Optimize potential.
2. Facilitate empowerment.
3. Implement visioning.
4. Strategize priorities.
5. Augment core structures.

"How did you do that?" I said admiringly.
"Those are the five things I always write down," she said and handed the list to Flip...

--from the short novel, Bellwether, in Futures Imperfect by Connie Willis

[Stitchawl]

Originally Posted by BenG

A little riff on corporate-speak from Connie Willis.
1. Optimize potential.
2. Facilitate empowerment.
3. Implement visioning.
4. Strategize priorities.
5. Augment core structures.

"Endeavor to persevere."
from 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'


Stitchawl

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by BenG

A little riff on corporate-speak from Connie Willis.

There used to be a Mission statement generator on the Dilbert site, I loved it but unfortunately it's gone.

[WT Sharpe]

.....Then came the most important part of the evening: the suggestion. Andy asked Marie to make her presence known by moving the heavy table. The table remained stationary, but Andy suggested that it was levitating, using comments such as: "That's good, Marie,"� "Lift the table higher,"� and "The table is moving now."� Andy then released the nonexistent spirit of Marie back into the ether, the lights were turned on, and everyone was thanked for coming to the show. Two weeks later, our guinea pigs were sent a questionnaire about their experiences during the show. We first asked people whether they thought that any of the events they had witnessed were paranormal. Forty percent of people who had expressed a prior belief in the paranormal thought that the phenomena were the result of genuine ghostly activity, compared with only about 3 percent of disbelievers. We then examined whether the suggestion had been effective. The results were startling. More than a third described how they had seen the table levitate. Again, participants' prior belief or disbelief in the paranormal played a key role, with half of disbelievers correctly stating that the table didn't move versus just a third of believers. Our questionnaire also asked people whether they had had any unusual experiences during the séance. It seemed that the atmosphere we had created caused people to experience a whole range of spooky effects, with one in five reporting cold shivers, a strong sense of energy flowing through them, and a mysterious presence in the room.
.....The message was clear. In the same way that simple suggestion can be used to fool people into recalling illusory childhood events, so it can also make a significant proportion of people experience the impossible.
..........— Richard Wiseman (1966 - ), Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire (U.K.), former magician, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). Quirkology (2007).

[WT Sharpe]

.....New times demand new measures and new men;
.....The world advances, and in time outgrows
.....The laws that in our fathers' day were best;
.....And, doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
.....Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
.....Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.
..........— James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), American poet, critic, diplomat. From his poem, "A Glance Behind the Curtain" (1843), Complete Writings (Boston and New York, 1904), IX, 144. Quoted in Arthur Alphonse Ekirch, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776-1816 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1931) 164, Questia, Web, 3 Oct. 2010.

[FlorenceArt]

Sometimes I wonder about the "steady growth of truth".

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Sometimes I wonder about the "steady growth of truth".

It's certainly not a straight line, is it?

[Stitchawl]

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." -
Henry David Thoreau


Stitchawl