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There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite
of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of
a great truth is also true.
Niels Bohr
Altruism is a fine motive, but if you want results,
greed works much better.
It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly
honest business. . . . What is true is that honesty
is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.
America...just a nation of two hundred million used
car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns
and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world
who tries to make us uncomfortable. I have an answering machine in my car. It says, "I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out"
A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.
A lady came up to me on the street and pointed to my
suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for
that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic
tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses.
Now I'll have to kill you too."
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
For him there is but one time, the artistic moment;
but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land
of Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world
yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet
with that calm which dwells in the faces of Greek statues,
the calm which comes not from the rejection but the
absorption of passion.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less
than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater
unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width
but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are
no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with
the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings
into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only
begins where Imitation ends, but something must come
into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of
richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler
architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any
rate.
I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the
problem.
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
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The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening
the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose
of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can
prove that you don't need it.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things
are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They
are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the
end; then stop.
Someone's boring me. I think it's me.
Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up
the intelligence? There's one marked Brightness, but
it doesn't work.
When the cat and mouse agree, the grocer is ruined.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. |
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When choosing between two evils I always like to take
the one I've never tried before.
Mae West
Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitler's
passionate hatred would never have been so fervently
echoed.
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy
is about telescopes.
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous,
or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives
after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they
are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect
or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear
music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what
I know they do not approve, and what they approve I
do not know.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just
as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." |
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Dan: It's because she doesn't need me. ... Dan: What about your things? Alice: I don't need things. Dan: Where would you go? Alice: Disappear. From The Movie Closer Natalie Portman (Alice), Jude Law (Dan)
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal
cards, and try to win one another's money. Idiots!
I am a deeply superficial person.
If the automobile had followed the same development
as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100,
get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a
year killing everyone inside.
Diplomacy --- the art of saying "Nice doggie"
'til you can find a stick.
"You're right, I'm wrong. Thanks for disagreeing."
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity
and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction
sap the vigors of the mind.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing.
Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is
up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money.
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills
of society. If we're looking for the sources of our
troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should
test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love
of power.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail
again. Fail better.
I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic
music has not got soul and they blame the computers:
"There is no soul here." It's like you couldn't blame the
computer: if there's no soul in the music it's
because nobody put it there.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility;
every opportunity, an obligation; every possession,
a duty.
I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In
nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror:
the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
for their apparent disinclination to do so.
I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize
in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed
circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more
irredeemably sinful than the betrayal, the exploitation,
of the young by those who should care for them.
Family . . . the home of all social evil, a charitable
institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for
house-fathers, and a hell for children.
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters;
united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the
origin of marvels.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning,
but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's
sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many
victories worse than a defeat.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like
to be a man's last romance.
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does
not ask reamins a fool forever.
For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence
of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be
that there is no reality in the things apart from their
appearences.
I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad
to make an exception.
Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection,
if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate,
to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than
a second car and another television set.
Where do you come from?
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he
thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long
into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected
generally happens.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly
have seeds of good in them and require moderate use
rather than total abstinence.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see
every problem as a nail.
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something
you remember.
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work,
ask him: 'Whose?'
"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy." "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." "Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity." "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." "The cut worm forgives the plough." "Dip him in the river who loves water" "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees." "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough" "If others had not been foolish, we should be so." "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star." "The busy bee has no time for sorrow." "The most sublime act is to set another before you." "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." "Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion." "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps." "Expect poison from the standing water." "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." "Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd." "Enough! or Too much." (selected) William Blake (1757-1827)
For a while I didn't have a car...I had a helicopter...no place to park it, so I just tied it to a lamp post and left it running. [slow glance upward]
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened
told by people who weren't there.
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing
to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot
be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a
variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain
arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable
individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals,
several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to
persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty,
too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock
Ellis.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics
is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
The best index to a person's character is (a) how he
treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how
he treats people who can't fight back.
I have a dream that my four little children will one
day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character. I have a dream today.
I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick
-- not wounded -- dead.
There can be no more ancient and traditional American
value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought
it with them to this country three centuries ago, and
they quickly imposed it on the Africans-who were not
allowed to learn to read and write-and on the Native
Americans, who were simply not allowed.
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
The more ignorant the authority, the more dogmatic it
is. In the fields where no real knowledge is even possible,
the authorities are the fiercest and most assured and
punish non-belief with the severest of penalties.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common
symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has
been done before.
Dont cry because its over, smile because it happend!!!
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking
at the stars.
I got up one morning and couldn't find my socks, so I called Information. She said, "Hello, Information" I said, "I can't find my socks" She said, "They're behind the couch"
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only
in solitude.
Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
"If ever I write again, in the sense of producing
artistic work, there are just two subjects on which
and through which I desire to express myself: one is
'Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in
life': the other is 'The artistic life considered in
its relation to conduct.' The first is, of course,
intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not merely
the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all
the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic
temperament also. He was the first person who ever
said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives.'
He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type of
what people should try to become"
That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits
of God will be a lasting witness against them &
the same will it be against Christians.
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage
with others.
Law of force: Don't force it - get a bigger hammer.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained
by stupidity.
The principle of maximum diversity operates both at
the physical and at the mental level. It says that
the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such
as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always
when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge
us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples
of things which make life difficult are all around
us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear
fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges
can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity
often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive,
but only by the skin of our teeth.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from
mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when
a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices
but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Military justice is to justice what military music is
to music.
If men as individuals surrender to the call of their
elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction
only for their own selves, the result for them all
taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear,
and of promiscuous misery.
A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend
is someone who will help you move a body.
Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...
well, I have others.
I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION.
I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT
ME AS A MEMBER.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human
freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed
of slaves.
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
La verdad es la verdad... Más mentiras no quiero. It's OK to think, no one has to know. Everything you've
learned in school as "obvious" becomes less
and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.
For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's
not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute
continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight
lines.
I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, "Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours" He said, "Yes, but not in a row"
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the
precipitate.
Old hippies don't die, they just lie low until the laughter
stops and their time comes round again.
Too many people are thinking of security instead of
opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone
else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions
a quotation.
"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best
friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful
men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius
is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world
is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination
alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on"
has solved and always will solve the problems of the
human race.
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.
I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance
to the first.
Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the
indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate
in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and
will occur in one way or another whatever the state
of the law may be.
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
Sometimes it's not the quality of the disasters that counts, it's the quantity.
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation...
The other eight are unimportant.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain
an artist once he grows up.
Be more concerned with your character than with your
reputation. Your character is what you really are while
your reputation is merely what others think you are.
Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing
people who can't talk for people who can't read.
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the
secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.
"Sex without love is an empty experience, but as
empty experiences go it's one of the best."
Only the shallow know themselves.
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere
ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The
Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves
to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery
is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical
slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the world depends.
Excuse me Mr. DJ, could you play something with a beat! I spilled spot remover on my dog. He's gone now.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive,
but what they conceal is vital.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
If you want to commit suicide you can use my razor; it's electric, but you can hang yourself with the cord.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where
his influence stops.
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life
it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the
mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort
of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living
rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom,
the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment
of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide
relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black
woman his last message to the world would have been
entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all
colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds
them together is the thorough suppression of women.
The art of leadership . . . consists in consolidating
the attention of the people against a single adversary
and taking care that nothing will split up that attention.
. . . The leader of genius must have the ability to
make different opponents appear as if they belonged
to one category.
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
"In Venezuela, many people think someone who passes up the chance to steal is a fool", said Gustavo Coronel, head of Quality of Life, a private group that conducts anti-corruption workshops. "We're a hyper-corrupt country." The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The good people sleep much
better at night than the bad people. Of course, the
bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.
The last Christian died on the cross.
The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge
of it.
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted
into classical education, if it were admitted that
the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and
the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things
absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise
were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted
to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted
and divine sources of Helicon, all might in their own
way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty,
and its coolness.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if
you win, you're still a rat.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur
in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their
crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd
want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
The rich are more envied by those who have a little,
than by those who have nothing.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you
can fake that, you've got it made.
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain
the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended
only for breif periods.
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive
his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap
door.
The worst government is the most moral. One composed
of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when
fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
Some women blush when they are kissed, some call for
the police, some swear, some bite. But the worst are
those who laugh.
There are things that are so serious that you can only
joke about them.
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things
about himself and then says them about other people.
Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one
of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must
be preserved at all cost.
Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and
insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving
to eat less.
I love to go shopping. I love to freak out salespeople.
They ask me if they can help me, and I say, "Have
you got anything I'd like?"
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To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not
love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore,
to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to
suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be
happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one
unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love
to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
Woody Allen
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent
people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation
of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false
friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in
others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social
condition; to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
The best index to a person's character is (a) how he
treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how
he treats people who can't fight back.
The tremendous world I have inside my head. But
how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces.
And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than
retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I
am here, that is quite clear to me.
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly
and they will show themselves great.
Truth may be stretched, but cannnot be broken, and always
gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.
"Truth in art is not any correspondence between
the essential idea and the accidental existence; it
is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the
form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it
is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than
it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows
the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth
in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward
rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate:
the body instinct with spirit."
I have learned this at least by my experiments; that
if one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours.
What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're in a sleeping bag, camping out with your girlfriend.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will
fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in
the valley.
We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study
that didn't come off. It's only a master who could
make such a blunder.
Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
We hear war called murder. It is not: it is suicide.
It is wisdom and wisdom only that will actually
eat away at the foundation of racism. We must reject
the conclusion that the body is the self. If we want
to get at the root cause of racism, we must understand
that we are not our bodies.
The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has,
but in what man is...Nothing should be able to harm
a man but himself. Nothing should be able to rob a
man at all. What a man really has is what is in him.
What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he
is the only animal that is struck with the difference
between what things are, and what they ought to be.
The great question that has never been answered and
which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my
thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is
"What does a woman want?"
. . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.
That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial
as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the
invisible.
We have deep depth.
We made too many wrong mistakes.
You can observe a lot by just watching.
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