He Said She Said

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
"The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally & without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science one finds only a mad never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon particles. For a moment the waves & particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death. "
- Martin Gardner
At the other end of spectrum Heisenberg on big things being more real than the particles. It's not a catchy quote but I think the conclusion is a bit surprising/cool. He's talking about people holding to the 19th Century ideas Alice in Wonderland discusses so I think it complements the above nicely.

"It would, in their view, be desirable to return to the reality concept of classical physics or, to use a more general philosophic term, to the ontology of materialism.They would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them.This, however, is impossible " - Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1958
 
Last edited:
" ...we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just new ideas that are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses" - James G. March
 
“I never sleep on planes. I don’t want to get incepted.”

Jack Donaghy
 
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt


On a similar note

The galleries are full of critics. They play no ball, they fight no fights. They make no mistakes because they attempt nothing. Down in the arena are the doers. They make mistakes because they try many things. The man who makes no mistakes lacks boldness and the spirit of adventure. He is the one who never tries anything. His is the brake on the wheel of progress. And yet it cannot be truly said he makes no mistakes, because his biggest mistake is the very fact that he tries nothing, does nothing, except criticize those who do things.

General David M. Shoup, USMC



Opportunity is missed by most because is it dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Edison



Bite my shiny metal ass

Bender Bending Rodriguez
 
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question."

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible."

"The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain."

"There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult."

"The only journey is the one within."

"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."

"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough."

- Rainer Maria Rilke
 
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."


Lovecraft wrote that people generally ignore this immensity of the universe, and its uncaring, amoral nature with regard to humanity, because if they could see the REAL big picture, see that our planet, our history and our entire species is just a mote of dust on the galactic wind, and more importantly, encounter the entities that really do perceive our world as that dust mote, everyone would go stark staring mad with the revelation.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

- Carl Sagan
 
" The idea that Art should, only ever be a mirror to reality has always seemed ass-backwards to me, given that Art is always and everywhere well-groomed and impeccably turned out, whereas Reality wears a pair of two-year-old Adidas trainers and a Toy Story T-shirt. As far as I’m concerned, it’s rather the job of reality to try and reflect Art. The purpose of Art is not to mirror reality, but to shape it by the imprints and aspirations that it leaves in the human mind. "

- Alan Moore
 
"We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

Charlton Ogburn Jr., “Merrill’s Marauders: The Truth about an Incredible Adventure,” Harpers, January 1957, p. 32.​
 
Inspired by the mention of duct tape above:

"If you're doing this in metric... best of luck to you."
Red Green​
 
"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use both feet." -- Keith Richards

"I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police." -- Keith Richards

"Yes, I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain." -- Keith Richards

"The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music, and what we do." -- Keith Richards
 
Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell
 
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

"Pair up in threes."

"Even Napoleon had his Watergate."

"It’s like déjà vu all over again."

"I never said most of the things I said."

--- Yogi Berra
 
What follows is good advice, from Epictetus' Manual, but I've never been able to take it, myself:

"In everything you do consider what comes first and what follows, and so approach it. Otherwise you will come to it with a good heart at first because you have not reflected on any of the consequences, and afterwards, when difficulties have appeared, you will desist to your shame.

Do you wish to win at Olympia? So do I, by the gods, for it is a fine thing. But consider the first steps to it, and the consequences, and so lay your hand to the work. You must submit to discipline, eat to order, touch no sweets, train under compulsion, at a fixed hour, in heat and cold, drink no cold water, nor wine, except by order; you must hand yourself over completely to your trainer as you would to a physician, and then when the contest comes you must risk getting hacked, and sometimes dislocate your hand, twist your ankle, swallow plenty of sand, sometimes get a flogging, and with all this suffer defeat.

When you have considered all this well, then enter on the athlete’s course, if you still wish it. If you act without thought you will be behaving like children, who one day play at wrestlers, another day at gladiators, now sound the trumpet, and next strut the stage. Like them you will be now an athlete, now a gladiator, then orator, then philosopher, but nothing with all your soul."
 
From a letter of Bernard Berenson in 1957:

All my life I have been reading about Homer, philological, historical, archaeological, geographical, etc. Now I want to read him as pure art only, as commensurate with the heart and mind while humanity retains both.
 
THE SAYINGS OF KIB (Sender of Life in all the Worlds)​

Kib said: "I am Kib. I am none other than Kib."

Kib is Kib. Kib is he and no other. Believe! Kib said: "When Time was early, when Time was very early indeed—there was only MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI. MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI was before the beginning of the gods, and shall be after their going."

And Kib said: "After the going of the gods there will be no small worlds nor big."

Kib said: "It will be lonely for MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI."

Because this is written, believe! For is it not written, or are you greater than Kib? Kib is Kib.

From Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana (1905)​
 
This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.

- R. Scott Bakker
 
"Stop worrying about how everything's going well. The fact that you don't have a problem doesn't mean you have a problem."


-Something I saw in the comments section of an article I read somewhere in the wilds of the internet. I found it relevant enough to write down on an index card that I keep in sight, but sadly I did not write down the username of the person who posted it. Apologies for not crediting you by name, original author, wherever you may be.
 
Was reminded of this today:

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” Edmund Burke.

 
A probably apocryphal anecdote about Niels Bohr:

A friend noted that Bohr had a horseshoe affixed above his door and asked incredulously if the great scientist believed in such superstitions. "Of course not," Bohr is supposed to have replied, "but I understand it's lucky whether you believe in it or not."
In Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (Routledge, 2017), p. 132.​
 
Taken from Antony Beevor's Crete: The Battle and the Resistance.

"While the battle against the paratroopers had shown the degree of Cretan courage, their warlike style had an engaging element of theatre. Old men, unflinching under fire fiddled with their ancient 'gra' muskets in the tradition of the Cretan joke: "Stand still Turk while I reload.""

"Theodore Stephanides recorded how he met a Cretan in the First World War who proudly put down his profession as brigand. When asked what the dividing line was between thief and brigand, the man had replied that a thief finding a wallet on the ground would take it. A brigand would first return it to the owner, then take it from him face to face."
 
"But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chief business “geniuses” of that paradise of traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man’s world they were successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges."

- HL Mencken
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top