Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition:
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learnéd usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
So many people behave as if learning ought to be confined to a carefully circumscribed period of life, including many highly-credentialed and otherwise intelligent people. This has always seemed very odd to me (except perhaps during finals).
Our operating policy
(borne out in practice too):
Never use a whole ass
when half-an-ass will do.
Dedicated to artificial deadlines and the automatic responses they engender in project managers.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset:
The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor and disaster have become confused.
If a loonie will buy
you a peek at her thigh,
That's a whore, eh?
And that's as far as I'll take that.
Eventually he expired, slowly poisoned by the daily ingestion of a toxic polymer, unknowingly caused by his too vigorous scraping of yogurt from its plastic container.
There are few worlds more magical–or more mythical–than a procrastinator's Later.
I wrote this some time ago, and was reminded of it when reading an excerpt from The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis:
When Thought contends that minds emerge
from random patterns in a surge
of neurons firing as they must, it
gives me then what cause to trust It?
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory:
If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
Recalling what you once could do
Can make you feel so old
Imagine just how young you'd feel
If you only didn't know
If I wanted to, I could;
I am yet convinced of it.
Therefore I remain unchanged;
Listless body, idle wit.
Inspired by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher:
Die sichere Überzeugung, daß man könnte, wenn man wollte, ist Ursache an manches guten Kopfes Untätigkeit, und das nicht ohne Grund.
To make a clever man believe
That you are different than you seem
Is harder still than to assume
The form you wish him to perceive
I've been reading (very slowly) through Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher, and came across the following aphorism, which I liked and—lacking the sense of a wiser man—decided to recast as a poem in English.
Kluge Leute glauben zu machen man sei, was man nicht ist, ist in den meisten Fällen schwerer als wirklich zu werden, was man scheinen will.
