I’ve always been a fan of quotes, the good ones are either small nuggets of wisdom expressed from an angle you had yet to consider, or simply function as an affirmation that others feel the same way you do.
Here at Lewd Cognoscenti we’re very proud of our collection of quotes; if you haven’t noticed the genius that keeps cropping up in the random quote box, please do. As I typed that I couldn’t help but envision somebody reading that, glancing to the side, spotting one of the few that are attributed to me, and thinking me even more ego maniacal then you already did. It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.
At any rate, what I love most about good quotes is the way they can redirect the mind. They’re almost always taken out of context, but the beauty is that they can be applied anywhere. Nothing better than one of those conversations where the fleeing shadow of some fundamental datum is being pinned into a corner; a good quote can spring the trap, or twist the perceptions that allowed the questioning in the first place and all of a sudden your mental prey is stalking you.
A good quote will make people stop and consider. The vagaries allowed by semantics provide the possibility of nearly infinite reactions, especially when balanced against an utterance by a respectable name.
I’d like to sell quotes on the street-corner, twist about the ‘penny for your thoughts’ notion and charge a nickle for someone elses thoughts.
I think my all-time favorite quote is Thomas Pynchon, from Gravity’s Rainbow:
“What are the stars, but holes in the body of god where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing.”
I won’t even bother telling you what it means to me, meaning is a matter for you to decide yourself.
And in the spirit of wanting to make certain that Lewd Cognoscenti continues to have the one of the best collection of quotes available on the internet, I’d love to hear what your favorites are.
February 20th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
“Research is to see what everybody else has seen,
and to think what nobody else has thought.”
- Albert Szent-Gyoergi
February 20th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Whoops. Sorry. I skipped some steps:
“It is the theory that decides what we can observe.” (Albert Einstein)
“Every body placed in the luminous air spreads out in circles and fills the surrounding space with infinite likenesses of itself and appears all in all and all in every part.” (Leonardo Da Vinci)
“…why has the modeling of some kinds of processes and systems, such as full-fledged learning systems, progressed so slowly? Still more generally: what is it about models that helps us better understand our world? And finally: why are models of all kinds so pervasive, even indispensable, in human activity?….Models are such an automatic feature of day-to-day existence that we rarely stop to think how ubiquitous they are….the ordinariness hides enormous complexity.” (John Holland)
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” (Albert Einstein)
“Inventive men have bad memories.” (Emerson)
“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better. (Jung)
“The chances of making a fool out of yourself while trying to degrade someone else approaches 1 (certainty) with every disparaging remark.” (Ben Gilmore)
“So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely…” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all — friends?” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Schopenhauer…points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else….one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too;…Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.” (Joseph Campbell)
“The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.” (Anthony Storr)
-”Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity change shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation….From different vantages this poorly known idea can be gleaned: The agents of evolutionary change tend to be fully alive organisms, microbes, and their ecological relations, not just the random mutations these microbes have inside them. The formation and diversification of any new species is the outward manifestation of the actions of subvisible forms of life: the smallest microbes, bacteria, their larger descendants, the larger microbes, protists, and fungi, along with their intracellular legacies, organelles such as mitochondria and centrioles. Evolution emerges from the fact that these small living organisms and their progeny tend to outgrow their bounds. The unseen beings that decimate our populations with virulent disease and provide soil nitrogen to our food plants play the major creative role in the genesis of new species.” (Margulis and Sagan)
“…that which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.” (Llinas)
“To them, I said,
the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images.”
(Plato)
“What can be controlled is never completely real; what is real can never be completely controlled.” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“Question Reality.” (bumper sticker)
“The Indians who use it [the hallucinogen peyote] as part of their [Native American Church] ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a ‘de-hallucinogen,’ since it’s their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them. There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a ‘hallucinogen’ would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web. That would support the ‘de-hallucinogen’ thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions.” (Robert M. Pirsig)
“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” (J. B. S. Haldane)
“…A small number of rules or laws can generate systems of surprising complexity….In addition, the systems are animated – dynamic: they change over time. Though the laws are invariant, the things they govern change….The rules or laws generate complexity, and the ever-changing flux of patterns that follows leads to perpetual novelty and emergence.” (John Holland)
“I was built by evolution by internalizing the properties of the outside world.” (Llinas)
“The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Experience enhances intuition, and if the intuition is strong and bravely realized, the artist is in a most favorable situation. The process of trial-and-error training is high in time and energy. In my own experience I worked on an uncertain empirical basis until I began teaching….” (Ansel Adams)
“Everything [in a moment of inspiration] happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or metaphor; everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors. (Nietzsche)
“Matter is nothing but trapped energy.” (Dan Brown)
“When in consonance, the pendulums do not oscillate parallel to one another, but instead they approach and separate in opposite directions….Huygens had just invented the concept of stabilization by negative feedback….Huygens had discovered inanimate sync.” (Steven Strogatz)
“Sperm, swimming side by side en route to the egg beat their tails in unison, in a primordial display of synchronized swimming….Epilepsy is caused by millions of brain cells discharging in pathological lockstep, causing the rhythmic convulsions associated with seizures….The astounding coherence of a laser beam comes from trillions of atoms pulsing in concert, all emitting photons of the same phase and frequency. Over the course of millennia, the incessant effects of the tides have locked the moon’s spin to its orbit….On the surface, these phenomena might seem unrelated….But at a deeper level, there is a connection, one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism. That mechanism is mathematics. All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.”
(Steven Strogatz)
“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
“Discount nothing. Everything counts.” (Richard Feynman’s mentor)
“The most important thing is for each of you to search for the answers to your own questions.” (Ellie to the children at the end of Contact, paraphrased from memory.)
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:18 am
One of my favorites:
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.” - Sylvia Plath
Also, Aye, you boggle my mind.