It is weariness upon the same things to labor and by them to be controlled. In change is rest.
Tag: quotes
Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.
Heraclitus, reminding you to slow your roll. Reminds me of Victor Hugo.
A movie that’s good for you is, by definition, not good for you.
An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.
A rural person expects to know every person in his world, and therefore thinks of every person as an individual. An urbanized person never expects to know the people he comes into contact with, and therefore rarely focuses on them as individuals. Stating the same thing in a different way, when you have more categories in your mind than people, you tend to see the categories as characteristics of the people. […] But once you have more people in your world than categories, you start to sort the people into categories.
Bill James in Popular Crime. Food for thought.
There are cases were poetry creates itself. […] Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in the world, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. […] “De la Mancha” – now this sounds noble and Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down he intended the word to sound perhaps as if he wrote “Don Quixote of Kansas City” […]. You see how those words have changed, how they have been ennobled.
Jorge Luis Borges in “The Riddle of Poetry” segment of his Norton Lectures. File under Borges.
My secret flaw is just not being very good, like everyone else.
I got a report card in first grade that said, “Jack excels in his studies and really enjoys math and English, but he starts fights on the playground that he brings back into the classroom.” I’ve tried to make that my operating premise.
At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don’t regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?
Epictetus in The Enchiridion. Cf. Mike Tyson.
Fermented spirits please our common people, because they banish care, and all consideration of future or present evils.
The difference between playing with Otis Redding and James Brown? I didn’t get fined when I played behind Otis.
You’d make a mistake while he was singing, and he’d turn around and say, “Ten dollars.”
Gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Ian Bogost (via austinkleon and douglas wolk). I like when I get to use my bullshit tag. See also Bogost’s Gamasutra feature on exploitationware. Naming is a powerful weapon.
We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition.
I actually believe the South is a hungrier place, and always describe the East Coast as a piece of bread, and the West Coast as a piece of bread, and the South, the meat. Everybody’s roots is from the South, so at the end of the day, we the meat.
J. Prince, quoted in Dirty South.
‘What am I doing here anyway?’ — the fundamental mantra if not prayer of every traveler. For it is precisely on a trip, in the morning, in a strange city, before the second cup of coffee has begun to work, that you experience most palpably the oddness of your banal existence. Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all.
Mark Larson 