Revolver Maps

пятница, 6 февраля 2015 г.

From Petronius to the present day

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
      -- H.G. Wells


I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because
they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
      -- Petronius, _The Satyricon_


I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
      -- Jean Louis Agassiz


I do not suppose that a Man loses his Time, who is not engaged in publick
Affairs, or in an illustrious Course of Action. On the contrary, I believe our
Hours may very often be more profitably laid out in such Transactions as make
no Figure in the World, than in such as are apt to draw upon them the Attention
of Mankind. One may become wiser and better by several Methods of Employing
one's self in Secrecy and Silence, and do what is laudable without Noise or
Ostentation.
      -- Joseph Addison, in the Spectator for March 4, 1712

Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you
and she will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and
futures -- when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love -- why, I'll tell
you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you
listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden
silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.
      -- Brian Moore, _The Luck of Ginger Coffey_


Intelligence is derived from two words--inter and legere -- inter meaning
'between' and legere meaning 'to choose.' An intelligent person, therefore, is
one who has learned 'to choose between.' He knows that good is better than
evil, that confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate,
that gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance,
compassion than arrogance, and that truth has more virtue than ignorance.
      -- J. Martin Klotsche


When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person,
you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces
surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night
you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
      -- Albert Camus

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always
do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
      -- Mark Twain

See how ignorant you are of your own self; there is no land so distant or so
unknown to you, nor one about which you will so easily believe falsehoods.
      -- Guigo, _Meditations_ (circa 1110-1116)

It's a unification of a Pythagorean sense of perfection which in its
mathematical exactitude recalls what is divine. We realize that the world has
been ordained, that it is ordered, that it does make sense, that it has been
thought of, and behind every imperfect form that we see, there is a perfect
form that has been badly imitated in our mortal world.
      -- Peter Sellars, on music, quoted in _A World Of Ideas II_

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some
reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is
one of those books.
      -- George Santayana

The brain thinks not by adding two and two to make four, but like a sheet of
wet paper on which drops of watercolour paints are being splashed, merging into
unforeseen configurations.
      -- Guy Claxton, _Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind_

Only the person who has been trained to think can be trusted to feel.
      -- Ambrose Bierce

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become
disguised to ourselves.
      -- La Rochefoucauld

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at
the right time and the instrument plays itself.
      -- Johann Sebastian Bach

Romans disapproved of Greek sports because the athletes competed nude. That was
shocking. On the other hand, people dripping with blood and dying for
entertainment was fine. This is strangely similar to the moral standards of
today's commercial television and family movies.
      -- John Ralston Saul, _On Equilibrium_


For the difference between art and entertainment is, finally, one not so much
of direction as of degree: though all entertainment is not art, all art must
include entertainment. "Entertaining" means interest-holding, and what bores
and fails to involve has no real artistic value. Granted, art makes demands; it
entertains those who are willing and able to feel, perceive, and think more
deeply and arduously -- more courageously if you will -- rather than those who
always want to leave their thoughts behind, most likely because thought has
abandoned them.
      -- John Simon

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go
into the other room and read a book.
      -- Groucho Marx

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller,
you're part of the road.
      -- Stewart Brand, _The Media Lab_


The road ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The main point
is to get those mistakes made and recognized as fast as possible!
      -- John A. WheelerOnce a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller,
you're part of the road.
      -- Stewart Brand, _The Media Lab_


The road ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The main point
is to get those mistakes made and recognized as fast as possible!
      -- John A. Wheeler


I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.


Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none left for
themselves.
      -- Peter McArthur


The inventors of genius hasten the march
of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
      -- Gustave Le Bon

There are too many people, and too few human beings.
      -- Robert Zend

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a
day.
      -- John A. Wheeler

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
      -- Goethe

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a nonworld.
      -- Peter Drucker

Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe
death as a cure.
      -- George McGovern



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