JDaphorism-Apr06

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JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations

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April 2006

Well, photography is a unique sort of art, in that it is a collaboration with the Universe. You go out there and you Dance with the world. If you wish to impose your will totally on it, I think painting or writing is more for you.
Eolake Stobblehouse

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy.
I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies;
that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970)

Conscious is being aware of something; conscience is wishing you weren't.

on America:

What is good about America is that in order to be a citizen, you are not asked to resign from your former identity. You cannot tell anyone, 'You have to erase from your mind the ancestors you had.' In France, we erase. America is a factory of citizens, which has some defects, some problems, but the country works, not too badly. Better, I think, than mine.
Bernard-Henri Lévy

America was founded on the basis of an idea: secular citizenship, where everyone contributes individually and impartially his knowledge, skills or labor for the good of all, while guarding his private self in any way he chooses--whose rights as a dutiful and constructive citizen are always protected--whose contribution is valued regardless of his personal identity or origins. America's idea of citizenship is not predicated on one's specific ancestry/background or ethnicity. That is, and will always be, its strength and its allure to outsiders.
JD

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches,
no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no
magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Jacques Barzun
professor and writer
(1907- )

Serenity, regularity, absence of vanity, sincerity, simplicity, veracity, equanimity, fixity, non-irritability, adaptability, humility, tenacity, integrity, nobility, magnanimity, charity, generosity, purity. Practise daily these eighteen ''ities'' and you will soon attain immortality.
Socrates

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil

Politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
Albert Einstein

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty.
J.G. Ballard

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.
Horace Walpole

A wonderful time--the War:/ when money rolled in/ and blood rolled out./
But blood/ was far away /from here-- /Money was near. Langston Hughes,
poet and novelist (1902-1967)

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot

Yet it's the reality of India that interests and engages me more than the vulgar and arrogant fantasies or pastimes of the privileged and nouveau riche now calling the shots.
JD

The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.
Dag Hammarskjold