June 2013
39 posts
“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
—Chuck Palahniuk - Choke
“The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.”
—Wayne Dyer
“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”
—Chinese Proverb
“If we are God’s unwanted children, so be it!”
—Fight Club
“There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”
—Edmund Wilson
“It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”
—David Brin
“Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.”
—Wesley Yang - ‘Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?’ (NYMag)
“
Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
” —Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum DiaryUpdate
Hi y’all! I’ve never actually written a post like this before, but I’ve got some announcements, so here goes!
First of all, a few weeks ago or so, we reached 1,000 posts and 150 followers! Yay, thanks! Good times for art, quotes and other fantastic things that keep life interesting.
In other news, I’ve started another tumblr blog! This blog is called ‘as you view it’ (url asyouviewitnow), and shows some of my favourite photographs that I’ve taken over the years. Some of those have already featured on this blog, but I thought it nice to have a special place for them. I’m still working on this blog (the template, for example :s), but have a look at http://asyouviewitnow.tumblr.com/ !
Thanks guys! Have a great one! Cheers, Val
“No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.”
—Elbert Hubbard
“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
“Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.”
—Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
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At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy.
If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
” —Eric Idle, comedian, actor, and author (b. 1943)
“Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.”
—Elbert Hubbard
“If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.”
—Donald H. Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
“Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
“Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”
—Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004), Dear Me (1977)
“People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people’s families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.”
—Doug Coupland
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs — jolted by every pebble in the road.”
—Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
“In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.”
—Nicholas Chamfort
“Wherein [art thou] good, but to taste sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? Wherein crafty but in villainy? Wherein villainous, but in all things? Wherein worthy but in nothing?”
—William Shakespeare - Henry IV, part I
May 2013
74 posts
“Autobiographical memory constitutes the memory system containing ‘‘facts and events that have been interpreted and integrated into a consistent story about one’s self’”.”
—Buckner, J.P. and R. Fivush (1998) `Gender and Self in Children’s Autobiographical Narratives’, Applied Cognitive Psychology 12: p. 407.
“Happiness is within. It has nothing to do with how much applause you get or how many people praise you. Happiness comes when you believe that you have done something truly meaningful.”
—Martin Yan
“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”
—Sir Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
“If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.”
—Wilhelm Dilthey
“I’ve done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can’t use it for progress.”
—Hans Rosling
“Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.”
—Alfred L. Kroeber
“Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.”
—Pierre Beaumarchais, playwright (1732-1799)
“You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.”
—Fight Club
