Aphorisms

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains.  You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow.  They smelled of moss in your hand.  Polished and muscular and torsional.  On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.  Maps and mazes.  Of a thing which could not be put back.  Not be made right again.  In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I contend that we are both atheists.  I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

- Stephen F. Roberts

You have to choose where you look, and in making that choice you eliminate entire worlds.

- Barbara Bloom, artist, 10 Dec 1995

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

- Kenneth Boulding

If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

- Susan Ertz (1894-1985), British novelist

It's almost impossible to overestimate the unimportance of most things.

- John Logue

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

- Sir Richard Francis Burton, British explorer (1821-1890)

It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable - he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.

- Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else.  In such a way do the days pass--
a blend of stock cars racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited.  And why?
What treasure do I expect in my future?
Rather it is the confusion of childhood
loping behind me, the chaos in the mind,
the failure chipping away at each success.
Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape
and so move forward, as someone in the woods
at night might hear the sound of approaching feet
and stop to listen; then, instead of silence
he hears some creature trying to be silent.
What else can he do but run?  Rushing blindly
down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks;
the other ever closer, yet not really
hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.

- Stephen Dobyns, Cemetery Nights

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

- Plutarch (~46AD - ~120AD)

I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.  All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

- Mark Twain

 If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ... forever.

- George Orwell, 1984

It means that we're just dolls. We don't have a clue what's really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they're tired, or bored.

- Neil Gaiman, The Doll's House

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

- Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we frequently do.

- Aristotle

Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression...

- Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

- Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1850