JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations

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January 2006

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Immortality means being loved by many anonymous people.
Sigmund Freud

Humor is akin to philosophy, for they are both born from a large perspective of life.
Will Durant

Have more than thou showest; Speak less than thou knowest.
William Shakespeare
from King Lear
Act I, Scene iv

an interesting aside:
The astute teacher and critic, Harold Bloom,
has suggested that, through his deep insights into human nature as they unfold in those sublime plays, Shakespeare had in a way foreshadowed the whole field of psychoanalysis well before Freud raised its edifice. For in Freud we find echoes of the great bard. And, as V.S. Naipaul said of Conrad, Freud could well have said: "Shakespeare has been everywhere before me."
JD

on Speech:

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter
(Nobel Laureate, 2005)

what was daring about the theory of Evolution?

Darwin was asserting that over the course of millenniums, miraculous bodily organs have taken shape out of prehistoric crudities, species have changed their characters and turned into completely different creatures, and human beings have come into existence, all because of accidental events and the brute forces of nature. Chance, in league with danger, created both the eye and the orchid, the ocelot and the man.
Edward Rothstein
(Nov 2005, NY Times)

The enemies of the environment are what I call 'suicide builders', and they'll no doubt take our planet with them. 

Once something you have that you've taken for granted is taken away, you place the highest value on it, though it may be of little or no use to you. Might we call this the "to have or to use" syndrome?
JD  

Better to be disliked sincerely than to be loved hypocritically.
JD

What do beautiful women, iron spikes, and pirates have to do with "true philosophy"? Everything and nothing seems the only philosophical answer. Nothing because philosophy is about the essential and not the accidental, about the life of the mind and the rules of reason. Everything because philosophy is also the discipline whose task is the life truly led—and that is a life, for good or ill, with spiked girdles, high-seas adventure, and beautiful women.
Leland de la Durantaye

A warning about urbanization and modernity: they're giving rise to a hollow "gospel of self-fulfillment." The central fact of the age is the emergence of "psychological man," a figure with no sense of duty and little sense of history..
Philip Rieff (1966)

A reflection on the triumph of consumer capitalism and expressive individualism:
"Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let's use Nietzsche's term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism."
Susan Sontag (1996)

on the Cyber World: the Net takeover

BOUTIQUE culture's trickle-down effects are touching people's hearts and intellects as well as their wallets. More important than steering consumers to innovative products, services and ideas they didn't even know existed, Google, Yahoo and other intelligent search engines are linking people with other people who share their particular interests and obsessions. Ten years ago, if you had a thing for 15th century Ottoman poetry, or you were the parent of a child with a rare sleeping disorder, or you just wanted to bitch about your boss, you might have felt isolated and freakish. Now you can find or create your own audiences and support groups online, at any time of the day or night.

Reed Johnson
(Dec 2005, L.A. Times)

The ease of communication has been transformed into evasive communication— or just plain evasion. Or have people become simply weary of too much communicated about too many things?
JD