- Tue Nov 30, 2010 10:58 pm
#77276
I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones, for the common folk are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.
(Lyman Frank Baum)
I once saw a picture of Christ by a Russian artist that really haunted me for a long time. Christ didn't look anything like the popular beaming Western Christian version of the kindly shepherd we're used to. He looked like a man, with a gaunt, lean, sort of haunted face with deep set large dark eyes. You could tell he was pretty tall, angular, rangy, a man alone and I guess that was the most striking thing about the picture. No halo, no radiant beam from heaven above. Just this extra-ordinary man--this ordinary human being who made himself extra-ordinary and tried to tell us all it was nothing more than any of us could do. Loneliness and a hint of doubt seemed to fill the picture. I would like to have known the man in that picture.
(I wish I knew)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
(Thoreau)
Before you can be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid
(?)
If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit
(Mitch Hedberg)
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 else from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age...
(H. P. Lovecraft)
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen
(D. H. Lawrence)
There should be a word for that microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world
(Terry Pratchett)
A desert. After death, a desert. The desert. No hells, yet. Perhaps there was hope.
[Fri'it] remembered a story from his childhood. It was about what happened when you died . . . the journey of your soul.
They said: you must walk a desert . . .
"Where is this place?" he said hoarsely.
THIS IS NO PLACE, said Death.
. . . all alone . . .
"What is at the end of the desert?"
JUDGEMENT .
. . . with your beliefs . . .
Fri'it stared at the endless, featureless expanse.
"I have to walk it alone?" he whispered. "But . . . now, I'm not sure what I believe-”
YES?
AND NOW, IF YOU WILL EXCUSE ME-
Fri'it took a deep breath, purely out of habit. The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now, you can think clearly . . .
There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.
What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
You couldn't get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already.
Fri'it set out.
(Terry Pratchett)
Dave
"the woman doth protest too much" hamlet by william shakespeare "if all men are born free then how come all women are born slaves" cant remember who said that. y'now by all the quotes im doing people will think im extremely sexist anyway one more "the spirit is eager'even though the flesh is a bin liner full of yoghurt" stephen fry 
"the woman doth protest too much" hamlet by william shakespeare "if all men are born free then how come all women are born slaves" cant remember who said that. y'now by all the quotes im doing people will think im extremely sexist anyway one more "the spirit is eager'even though the flesh is a bin liner full of yoghurt" stephen fry 
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