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41 Random Quotes

If you think you know what the HELL is going on, YOU'RE PROBABLY FULL OF SHIT.
— Robert Anton Wilson
Guard the mysteries, constantly reveal them.
— Unknown «Elise Mathson»
It's one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible'. It's another to experience it, however momentarily.
— David Graeber «The New Anarchists» in #healing & #wilding
Every now and then, when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas … with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
— Hunter S. Thompson
A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.
— Charles Eisenstein «The Coronation»
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen
The sea of bullshit is vast and strangely magnificent.
— Tessa Lena «The Establishment. The Machine. The Human Being»
A mythological move is to be aware of all the hundred trembling secrets at the edge of your vision. Because they are the things that want to secrete their intelligence into you about the problem that's right in front of you.
— Martin Shaw «Mud and Antler Bone»
This is the time to be thoughtful, be expressive, be generous. Be ‘taken advantage of.' The channels exist now to give creativity away, at no cost, to millions. Never mind if you make large sums of money along the way. If you successfully seize attention, nothing is more likely. In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident. That cannot be helped, so don't worry about it any more. Henceforth, artistic integrity should be judged, not by ones classic bohemian seclusion from satanic mills and the grasping bourgeoisie, but by what one creates and gives away. That is the only scale of noncommercial integrity that makes any sense now.
— Bruce Sterling «Viridian Design Manifesto »
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard… Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
— John F. Kennedy «Rice University, 1962»

We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

— Norbert Wiener «

The Human Use of Human Beings

» in #reflecting
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
— Emma Goldman
Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it.
— Penn Jillette
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get paste this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It's only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And i took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while.
— Ira Glass in #inspiring, #making & #teaching

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

— Henry van Dyke in #inspiring & #wilding
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
— Winston Churchill
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, through education or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
— Robert Heinlein
It wasn't worth it.
— Harry Patch «lastingtribute.co.uk»

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

— Richard Feynman in #failing & #wilding
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
— Henry Miller «1891-1980»
Creativity is the residue of time wasted.
— Albert Einstein
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
I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it ‘the backwards law'. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float … insecurity is the result of trying to be secure … contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.
— Alan Watts «The Wisdom of Insecurity»
Thus even as servers die or are put to sleep, even as operating systems come and go, I can carry the work forward — despite all of the progress around me. […] But really — no complaints — it's fun to wander around in the middle of so much waste and progress, and I'd rather be here than anywhere. You just have to keep working out how to travel light and stay portable.
— Paul Ford «The Problem of Nomads»
The boys didn't know where they were going. They didn't. Not really. They just knew that they wanted to go.
— Carolyn Cassady «Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line»
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.
— Anne Frank «The Diary of a Young Girl»
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like work.
— Thomas Edison
In the war between good and evil, a great weapon of the forces of evil is the notion that there is a war between good and evil.
— Charles Eisenstein «Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order»
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
— Mark Twain
We don't have any walled gardens in our world, because there's no margin in controlling things for poor people. … it really is just you rich people that get locked up for your own safety. We will still be free, and living in dangerous lands. … Just like in the real world, our neighborhoods online will be built from crap materials, mildly dangerous, old, and interesting. … I think the halcyon days are ahead for the life of the mind among the poor, and we'll do it with the same freedom we've done everything, the freedom of the forgotten.
— Quinn Norton «Why I won’t be buying an iPad»
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete, that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theater Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
— J.D. Salinger «Franny and Zooey»
Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
— Dieter Rams
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King Jr.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

— Aldous Huxley in #crying, #laughing & #teaching
We are dreaming individually and collectively in ways that our human brains cannot fully comprehend.
— Scott Catamas «comment on Parallel Timelines»
I began working outdoors. I put up a tarp, so I had shade on my laptop. The first time it rained, the tarp kept the rain off. All of my novels in the last 16 years have been written 100% outside.
— Kim Stanley Robinson «Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth» in #inspiring, #making & #wilding

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

— Alan Watts in #loving
We have emerged from a line of descent that began with microbial life, a line common to all plant and animal species … [we] are dependent not only on other human beings and on the physical world but also on other creatures—animals, plants, microbes—that have evolved together with us. We will ultimately destroy ourselves if we thoughtlessly eliminate the organisms which constitute essential links in the complex and delicate web of life of which we are a part.
— Rene Dubos «(rephrased).»
Get into the water and THEN dump the bag of ice in. This allows your body to slowly get used to the cold water. It sure beats screaming like a little girl when you suddenly sit your butt on 35 degree water …
— GootzTX «runnersworld.com»
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose.
— George Monbiot «Popular Documentary Takes Us Nowhere»
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
— Charles Bukowski «Factotum»