JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations

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October 2006

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I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the
revolution. Hannah Arendt
historian and philosopher (1906-1975)

I've believed for some time that language is the last frontier of identity. Here's what Paul Fussell, writing in the magazine GRANTA 84, observed:

"Languages alone divide 'the world' into hundreds of jurisdictions notable for not understanding the idiom of even their closest neighbour, and idiom includes much more than spoken or written words. It includes everything ignored by American language study, like hand gestures, eye movement, and eyebrow elevation as a signal of disbelief. We can ask: How many top dogs now busy in Iraq know enough of the local languages and, as important, the appropriate gestures even to tell a successful dirty joke?"

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947)

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould
evolutionary biologist

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. It it were merely
challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn
between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.
This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White writer (1899-1985)

A lot of people hate heroes. I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.

Mark Helprin (novelist)

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be
unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
 

If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill

"poetry, indeed all art, is like a sixth sense; a

kind of echolocation, a system of discovering identity and 

location through ripples of words that travel between the artist and 

the boundaries of the world, between artist and reader..."

from the editorial for 'All Poetry is Protest'

PEN@PRITHVI September Session:

AN ISLAND NEVER CRIES

"Human beings," he later tells me, apropos of a theme in The Human Touch, "are a very brief presence. We occupy very little space and little time. We're an insignificant part of the universe." The nature of the universe is "the unresolvable paradox" he detects at the heart of philosophy - even "perhaps of all human thought". As he writes in the book: "The universe plainly exists independently of human consciousness but what can ever be said about it that has not been mediated through that consciousness? ... And if nothing can be said, or nothing seen, nothing understood, what kind of a universe would it be?'....."If I were God," he says, "I'd find it rather difficult to believe in myself."

on Michael Frayn--from The Wise Guy by Tom Adair

The Scotsman, 23 Sept 2006

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're
a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without
pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette writer (1873-1954)

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
Ronald Searle
artist (1920- )

Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
H. Mumford Jones

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
poet, dramatist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1865-1939)

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Salvador Dali
painter (1904-1989)

By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American
education. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a
lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,
get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of
sophisticated armaments.
Russell Baker columnist and author (1925- )

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein

To which I might add this:

Don't live life as though there will always be a tomorrow.
JD

It may seem a grave limitation for any writer to leave the facts as facts, but self-limitation is a key to art. On this frontier we should stand.
Timothy Garton Ash
(Nov 2002, Guardian Unlimited)