Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

We were eager to have done and trusted to luck


What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment
of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful!
There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go


Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania
which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way


For the mindful god does detest untimely growth


It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven


Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth that bore you away, audaciously perishing!


I call on Fate to give me back my soul


Friedrich Hölderlin
German lyric poet (Hyperion)
(Born this day 1770)



This name is fake. I was never called Hölderlin, but Scardanelli!

[Tamrin]

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars
of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less


The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom — these are the pillars of society


A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth


One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after,
it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the
struggle and says, “I have it,” merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it


A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm


These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow


A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong


Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian playwright (An Enemy of the People)
(Born this day 1828)



The devil is compromise

[Tamrin]

1 of 2:

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us


Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even
understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way


The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something
about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about


A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one.
And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy


It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation
of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds


The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount


Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything


B.F. Skinner
US psychologist, Behaviorism pioneer (Skinner box)
author, inventor, social philosopher and poet
(Born this day 1904)



Men build society and society builds men

[Tamrin]

2 of 2:

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best
one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying


The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again


No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless
restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out


Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of
behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both science
yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters


Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten


We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading


The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do


B.F. Skinner
(Born this day 1904)



Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will
tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing
a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.
Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job.
But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured

[Tamrin]

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings,
of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges
of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become


The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than
the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact


I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on.
The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is
the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives


I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some
power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must fin-
ally become … This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis


So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them.
We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us


Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know
cannot be the limits — what else should a man's life be?


We are free at last to believe in ourselves


David Malouf
Australian writer (Remembering Babylon, An Imaginary Life)
(Born this day 1934)



I totally reject the idea of being representative in any way. This whole idea of
role models. It's a terrible idea. I don't like the idea of being some kind of repre-
sentative consciousness of the country. You do what you do, the way you do it,
out of a kind of necessity. I can't see how that would be useful to anyone else

[Tamrin]

Nobody ever sees the inside of their body, ... It's wild ...
it's not nearly as orderly as you think it's going to be


Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot
and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning
and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget


In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or
accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you
expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become


Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that
your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until
the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for
millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter


It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around
to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning
disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing


A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it
can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world "all working
on their arts and crafts" can seem like heaven or, if you're me, hell


Worry lives a long way from rational thought


Mary Roach
American author (popular science)
(Born this day 1959)



All good research — whether for science or for a book — is a form of obsession

[Tamrin]

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a
society can be understood without understanding both


Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the
opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to
formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose


Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy,
Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of
automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests


Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the
wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated,
to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions


What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded
by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited


Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images,
mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another,
everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the
mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind
of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions


The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the
star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America,
this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white
ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone
else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States


C Wright Mills
American sociologist (Power Elite)
(Died this day 1962)



People with advantages are loath to believe that
they just happen to be people with advantages

[Tamrin]

I am a daylight atheist


It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have
a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody


I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that
which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the
old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer


The most important things to do in the world are to get
something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you


All publicity is good, except an obituary notice


New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment...
a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat


It is a good deed to forget a poor joke


Brendan Behan
Irish writer and poet
(Died this day 1964)



Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops

[Tamrin]

Behaviour shapes emotions


It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking,
than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting


I've started to look at life differently. When you're thanking God for every little you —
every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water — you can't help
but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all


There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality.
Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one


It's a different way of looking at the world. Your life isn't about rights. It's about responsibilities


It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so
barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?


I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverent agnostic. Which
isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a
thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred
ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans
created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance


A.J. Jacobs
American journalist and author (The Year of Living Biblically)
(Born this day 1968)



The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self.
Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one

[Tamrin]