41 Random Quotes

— Richard Bach «Illusions»

All the problems of the world can be solved in a garden.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

— Raoul Vaneigem «The Revolution Of Everyday Life»

You can't change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.

— Ursula Le Guin «Four Ways to Forgiveness»

War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.

— Harry Patch «boingboing.net»

We’ve got to rethink this question of war […] The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

— Howard Zinn «The American Revolution
» in #crying & #teaching

‘Cos the righteous truth is, there ain't nothing worse than some fool lying on some Third World beach wearing spandex, psychedelic trousers, smoking damn dope pretending he gettin' consciousness expansion. I want consciousness expansion, I go to my local tabernacle an' I sing with the brothers and sisters

— Alabama 3 «Ain't Going to Goa»

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble […] They can never be solved, but only outgrown […] Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.

— Carl Jung

There's nothing I love more than hearing, watching, or reading someone doing the one thing they can't not do.

— Mark Pilgrim

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.

— E.B. White in #daring & #laughing

The scientist lives in a world of matching, their idea of proof is just matching evidence against evidence. Any breakthrough beyond that paradigm is as disturbing to the scientist as to the educator.

— Marshall McLuhan «via The Summer Way with Norman Mailer 1968 » in #breaking, #laughing & #making

“Everything in moderation” is great advice, if your goal is moderately good health.

— Ken Berry «@KenDBerryMD»

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

— John Gall «via David Heinmeier Hansson» in #designing, #making & #teaching

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence, the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

— Bill Mollison in #eating, #healing & #making

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

— Walt Whitman in #inspiring, #teaching & #wilding

The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive.

— Coco Chanel in #laughing

The world is not dying. It's not falling apart. It's changing. What young generation has ever come into its own in a world free of peril? […] I personally believe that pessimism is an indulgence, despair an insult to the imagination. There are wonderfully positive things out there […] I tire of those who fuel the flames of fear.

— Wade Davis

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C.S. Lewis «God in the Dock via The Fourth Revolution
»

If thew world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

— Yogi Berra

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

— William Shakespeare «“Hamlet”»

I want to live a savage life, of bared teeth and beauty and love.

— Twm Gwynne in #daring & #wilding

The river doesn't flow straight. Only the Army Corps of Engineers believes that rivers flow straight.

— Walter Ritte «Hawaii's Ancient Aquaculture Revival » in #designing, #healing & #laughing

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

— Anaïs Nin

I just spent a billion dollars educating you; I’m not letting you go now!

— Thomas Watson «via In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks
» in #failing, #teaching & #working

I love it when a plan comes together!

— John “Hannibal” Smith «The A-Team»

This subreddit wouldn’t exist if probiotics or yogurt fixed everyone’s health problems.

— Eleanorina «r/zerocarb» in #eating, #healing & #laughing

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country … corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.

— Abraham Lincoln

It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally, I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid

— Richard Feynman in #teaching & #working

One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.

— M.F.K. Fisher «“The Art of Eating”»

NAT turns the Internet into TV.

— Rob Flickenger

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

— Pablo Picasso

Sarge is once again proof that communities can do great things, even communities of irritable, cantankerous, grudge-holding, flaming Free Software nuts. 😉

— Steve Langasek «speaking about the release of Debian Linux 3.0»

Each definition is a piece of secret ripped from Nature by the human spirit. I insist on this: any complicated thing being illumined by definitions, being laid out in them, being broken up in pieces, will be separated into pieces completely transparent even to a child, excluding foggy and dark parts that our intuition whispers to us while acting, separating the object into logical pieces, then only can we move further towards new success due to definitions.

— Nikolai Luzin «quote from Loren R. Graham's “Naming infinity”»

Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, “I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”

— Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

House finished, man dies.

— Proverb «Chinese
»

And now we have two forces in opposition, both originating in the mind. Our old mind hews closely to the community and Dunbar's Number. Our new mind seeks the power of the mob, and the amplification of numbers beyond imagination. This is the central paradox of the early 21st century, this is the rift which will never close. On one side we are civil, and civilized. On the other we are awesome, terrible, and terrifying. And everything we've done in the last fifteen years has simply pushed us closer to the abyss of the awesome.

— Mark Rickerby «The Shock of Now»

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

— Martin Luther King Jr. «Strength to Love
» in #laughing & #wilding

Schooling converts us from humans into slaves for the global economy by cutting us off from nature and natural thinking.

— Manish Jain «Dumbo Feather, Issue 63»

But I can be happy with how things are right now and still want the future to be different.

— Jess Whittlestone «Is there a tension between improvement and contentment?»