Books help us understand who we are and how we behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things you don’t get in real life- wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of the day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.
– Anne Lamott - Bird By Bird
Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment […] The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
– C.S. Lewis - The Weight of Glory…the constant streaming in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress our own, and indeed in the long run paralyse the power of thought if it has not that high degree of elasticity which is able to withstand that unnatural stream. Therefore ceaseless reading and study directly injures the mind…
– Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Idea Vol IIWhatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.
– Barbara Sher - Wishcraft
Our choice is not between good and bad; it’s between terrible and worse. The nation has a level of commitment … which I don’t think we can psychically meet, absent huge changes in how the government finances itself.
– Alan Greenspan - Wall Street JournalWhy college is so expensive
High tuitions are no fluke. They exist as a direct result of government-guaranteed student loans. Without such loans, tuition could not rise beyond students’ or their families’ ability to pay. Because students have almost unlimited access to credit, universities are able to raise tuitions without the limits market discipline would otherwise enforce.
Any item for which consumers receive a subsidy to buy will naturally be more expensive with the subsidy than without it.
Peter Schiff - Crash Proof
…nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there [is] not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.
– Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin
Speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation[…] They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is[…] One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
The cranium is a spacetraveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
– Vladimir Nabokov - PninAbout Me
Upon which many were tumbled.
