Notable Quotable 55

Feb 17, 2023

There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace.

- G.K. Chesterton

Some poor phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he's supposed to be.

- Duncan Trussell

The first principle is that you should not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

- Richard Feynman

Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.

- Johann Goethe

There is no use whatsoever trying to help people who do not help themselves.

- Andrew Carnagie

Our progress in science and technique has involved some tincture of evil with good. Our comforts and conveniences may have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber. We have immensely developed our means of locomotion, but some of us use them to facilitate crime... We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs. We applaud the cures and incisions of modern medicine if they bring no side effects worse than the malady; we appreciate the assiduity of our physicians in their mad race with the resilience of microbes and the inventiveness of disease; we are grateful for the added years that medical science gives us if they are not a burden–some prolongation of disability. We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.

- Will Durant

It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

- Ken Kesey

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event.

Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

- Michael Denton

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

- Ezra Pound

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.

- Pythagoras