Some Quotes for August 2024 (#28)
Philip Barry, George Eliot, Margaret Mead, Camille Bordas, George Packer, James Baldwin, Robert Pirsig, Evelyn Glennie, Sendhil Mullainathan, Hillel
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I was able to track down on the internet. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
The time to make up your mind about people is never. –Philip Barry
From Middlemarch: An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person. –George Eliot
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. –Margaret Mead
From “Chicago on the Seine”: You had too much power, when speaking of the dead. They had the double disadvantage of not being able to fight you if you said something false about them, and of not having had access to any of the new knowledge the world had amassed since they’d died. I often thought that that was the worst thing about dying: that all your last positions and opinions became fixed forever, that you couldn’t change your mind anymore. It made you look stupid. –Camille Bordas
Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.
Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away. –George Packer
From The Fire Next Time: Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be “good” not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has stayed beyond some particular boundary. –James Baldwin
The world’s greatest fool may say the sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out. –Robert Pirsig
If you think you can, you might. If you think you can’t, you’re right! –proverb (as related by my first grade teacher, Melissa Ramgren)
From “Hearing Essay”: Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing…Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds. –Evelyn Glennie
From People I (Mostly) Admire, Ep. 37: We imagine the mind to be this sort of warehouse of information, but don’t appreciate how much…it’s like a train station that people walk through. –Sendhil Mullainathan
If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when? –Hillel