I fantasized that finally not being tied down to a dependent would give my spontaneous nature a chance to grow and flower. Then I realized that not only didn't I have much of a spontaneous nature but that the reason I wasn't partaking of the constant barrage of interesting activities and social events all around me was because I was a lazy sloth.
"Pets and the Single Girl", in How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
In an LA Times op-ed, "God's Dupes: Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics -- and are every bit as delusional"
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I'm starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner's sickness for home. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids -- and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play.
"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Waves wash off the peach blossoms, / wind twirls catkins down; / can spring colors possibly be allowed to stay? / Our four eyes stare at each other; / our resentments are concealed. / Gold Tooth Road, / Gold Horse Road -- / places for broken-hearted goodbyes.
The brown sparrow and the dragonfly / can't perch on the same tree. / The purple swallow and the shrike / fly off in opposite directions. / A new resentment starts again just as in the past; / she is wrong, / I am wrong, / in lonely inn beneath wild mountains / we grieve at setting sun.
Translated by Jonathan Chaves in The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry
It makes for happiness to be what you can, when you cannot be what you would.
It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed, and how it has never been possible to predict for certain how a human being will behave. History, with its endless procession of passers-by, most of whose encounters have been missed opportunities, has so far been largely a chronicle of ability gone to waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different. That is the origin of anxiety, but also of hope, and hope is the origin of humanity.
An Intimate History of Humanity
Serafina Pekkala considered, and then said, "Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honour, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?"
The Golden Compass
[On the interior of the human body] What economy of colors there, compared to a tropical fish or a sunrise or even a pigeon's neck -- dull red, indistinct gray buff, some splotches of green. But what opulence of forms -- serpents, goblets, tapestries, coils, pouches, conch shells, washboards, sheets, waves, curls, fountains of translucent tissue.
Quoted in Christine Quigley's The Corpse: A History
My father looked at me sternly with that look I would learn to know so well, and said: "Justin, on n'attaque jamais l'individu. On peut être en désaccord complet avec quelqu'un sans pour autant le dénigrer." ... Parce que la simple tolérance n'est pas assez: il faut un respect réel et profond de chaque être humain, peu importe ses croyances, ses origines, et ses valeurs.
In the eulogy for his father, Pierre Eliott Trudeau, 3 Oct 2000
I am falling / Like a stone / Being born again / Into the sweet morning fog.
"The Morning Fog"
A perilous trade, indeed, is that of a man who has to bring his tears and laughter, his recollections, his personal griefs and joys, his private thoughts and feelings to market to write them on paper, and sell them for money. Does he exaggerate his grief, so as to get his reader's pity for a false sensibility? feign indignation, so as to establish a character for virtue; elaborate repartees, so that he may pass for a wit; steal from other authors, and put down the theft to the credit side of his own reputation for ingenuity and learning? feign originality? affect benevolence or misanthropy? appeal to the gallery gods with claptraps and vulgar baits to catch applause?
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
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.
Meditations (circa 1110-1116)
Horas non numero nisi serenas -- is the motto of a sun-dial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene." What a bland and care-dispelling feeling! How the shadows seem to fade on the dial-plate as the sky lours, and time presents only a blank unless as its progress is marked by what is joyous, and all that is not happy sinks into oblivion! What a fine lesson is conveyed to the mind -- to take no note of time but by its benefits, to watch only for the smiles and neglect the frowns of fate, to compose our lives of bright and gentle moments, turning always to the sunny side of things, and letting the rest slip for our imaginations, unheeded or forgotten! How different from the common art of self-tormenting!
On a Sun-Dial
Annie and I had a deep-seated need to learn all the facts surrounding Galen's murder. Although we were very different people in many ways, we shared the same basic values. One of these was a belief in the redemptive power of truth. If the truth didn't always set us free, at least it kept us clean and made our lives less complicated.
Goneboy: A Walkabout
Agents, conclude Shneiderman, are crutches that don't work, mere invitations to mediocrity. They are "things that think for people who don't."
Quoted in Andrew Leonard's Bots
How would it be if we remembered nothing / except the garbage and the rubbishing. / The takeaways, the throwaways, the takeovers, / The flakes and breakups, the disjected members / Scattered across the landscape, across everything?
Nothing stands up, nothing stands clear and whole, / Everything bits and pieces, all gone stale, / All to the tip, the midden topped up high / With what we used, with what we threw away: How would it be if this was all we could feel?
That will not be. Remembering, or feeling, / Or knowing anything of anything. / Will be the last we know of all this stuff. / It will be there for others, seekers of / Things that remain of us, who then are nothing.
A money lender. He serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the subjunctive; and ruins you in the future.