Favorite Deep Quotes

[Thumpalumpacus]

Then there's Mark Twain:

"Never argue with an idiot. He'll pull you down to his level, and then beat you with experience."

Someone has actually Graphiti-ed  this quote on one of the garbage bins in my neighborhood, believe it or not.

See, I can get down with this sort of tagging.

[GirlyMan]

I have been routinely accused of being cynical by people who ironically understand morality in the most cynical possible way. In keeping with my cynical character, my favorite quote is "Polly wants a cracker."

That reads like you are a parrot with no original or novel ideas of your own.

Polly is flourishing, Girly.

You want a cracker for it?

[no one]

 I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

Jack Handey

[Gwaithmir]

"Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume." (Robert G. Ingersoll)

[Thumpalumpacus]

 I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

Jack Handey

There's Jack Handey, and then there's everybody else. 

Some people think outside the box. Other people take the box and throw it into the wood-chipper.

[Gwaithmir]

“It is apparently necessary for me to state once again──not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me──but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute──where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote──where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference──and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish──where no public official either accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source──where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or public acts of its officials.” (Pres. John F. Kennedy)

[EvieTheAvocado]

Here's some of my favorite quotations:



"I’m bewildered. I’m completely uninterested in the answer to the question…‘What have I made of my life?’ I’m living it…what I care about, insofar as I care about myself and my life, is how I am now. The way I am now is profoundly shaped by my past, but it is the present shaping consequences of the past that matter, not the past as such."—Galen Strawson

"I have the persistent sensation, in my life…that I am just beginning."—John Updike

"An imaginative man is apt to see, in his life, the story of his life; and is thereby led to conduct himself in life in such a manner as to make a good story of it rather than a good life."—Henry Taylor

"But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen."—spoken by a character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, "Gravity’s Rainbow", 1973, p. 34

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."—Alan Moore, Watchmen

"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."—Virginia Woolf

"Your…extensive surface of polished steel…rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable…The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person."—George Eliot

"As I think further about my mental life, I’m met by the sense that there is no ‘I’ that goes on through the waking day…If I consider myself as a mental subject of experience, my sense is that I am continually new."—Galen Strawson

"Insofar as I have gotten closer [to a desirable mentality], it’s just living a life, and the long and devoted practice of philosophy. I think philosophy really does change one over time. It makes one’s mind large, in some peculiar manner. It seems to me that the professional practice of philosophy is itself a kind of spiritual discipline, in some totally secular sense of ‘spiritual’…It would be very surprising if intense training of the mind couldn’t change the shape of the mind as much as intense training of the body changes the shape of the body."—Galen Strawson

"I recognise that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?"—W Somerset Maugham

"Don't fear god,
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure."—Epicurus

"Nothing comes from nothing."—Parmenides

"I think, therefore I am."—Descartes

"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance"—Socrates

"Happiness is like a cat, if you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap."—William Bennett

"I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense... Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due."—Albert Einstein

"Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. … In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this."—Schopenhauer

"Make an island of yourself,
make yourself your refuge;
there is no other refuge.
Make truth your island,
make truth your refuge;
there is no other refuge."—The Buddha

[Cheerful Charlie]

“Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one.”
― William S. Burroughs

[EvieTheAvocado]

It's funny how with the absence of the word "that" mister Burroughs' statements is ambiguous ... because we could just as much hear it as: "You shouldn't be such a shit. Oh, and by the way, you don't realize it but, you actually are one.", as we could, indeed, hear it as: "You shouldn't be so much of a shit that you don't even realize that you, indeed, are a complete, total and utter shit."

But I get it that it's funny because William is combining formality with informality.

Funny quote. Not heard that one.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"Americans always do the right thing ... after they've tried everything else." Winston Spencer Churchill.

[EvieTheAvocado]

"Americans always do the right thing ... after they've tried everything else." Winston Spencer Churchill.

That reminds me of this one:

[Mark]

Two from Frank Herbert:

"What senses do we lack that we do not perceive entire worlds around us?"

From observing my dogs I know smell is one of them but it wouldn't surprise me to learn there are others.  Our sense of smell is like sight in the most primitive creatures which can barely just detect in which direction there is more light.  I'm surprised they don't wave their paws in front of our noses to see if there is any air passing through at all.

[Mark]

 I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

Jack Handey

There's Jack Handey, and then there's everybody else. 

Some people think outside the box. Other people take the box and throw it into the wood-chipper.

Made me COL.  

Show ContentSpoiler:

chortle out loud

[Mark]

William Blake's: "He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise." Because it may not be possible for the observer to avoid influencing the observed, but it's still worth a try.


From Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (because we can't help it):

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”


My scribble because no man is an island:

Wholest each together be
between the two a rainbow see;
All is seen through either eye
but depth requires two should try.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Just between us 
I think it's time for us to recognize
The differences we sometimes feared to show 
Just between us
I think it's time for us to realize 
The spaces in between 
Leave room
For you and I to grow

Neil Peart

[Phaedrus]

Youth and impatience is about creating those waves. Age and wisdom is about being the unsuspecting whirlpool. ~ me

[Gwaithmir]

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley)
 

[Old Man Marsh]

[Gwaithmir]

"In jungle, strong always win." (Tarzan)

[JesseB]

"Life is shit, and then you die." (no clue who said it)

[Dānu]

"Life is shit, and then you die." (no clue who said it)

[Tres Leches]

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by -Sun Tzu


-Teresa

[Gwaithmir]

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by   -Sun Tzu


-Teresa

I can think of a few Catholic nuns I wish that applied to.

[Tres Leches]

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by   -Sun Tzu


-Teresa

I can think of a few Catholic nuns I wish that applied to.

If you're talking about Catholic school, they've probably already floated by. Maybe you were distracted and didn't get the pleasure of witnessing it. 

-Teresa

[Gwaithmir]

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by   -Sun Tzu


-Teresa

I can think of a few Catholic nuns I wish that applied to.

If you're talking about Catholic school, they've probably already floated by. Maybe you were distracted and didn't get the pleasure of witnessing it. 

-Teresa

Well, actually a couple that I did know "floated" by. During the early 1980's I found the obituary for the Sister Superior of my school in the local paper. I don't know what her problem was, but she systematically insulted every student she spoke to. I showed it to a friend and we were both so elated that we danced a jig around his apartment. About 15 years ago I spotted the obituary of the nun who taught history when I was a senior in high school. She was a humorless bitch and had the disagreeable habit of jabbing a finger (hard) into students whenever she asked a question. She was only in her early 60's when she died, which sweetened the news for me.