siiky
2020/05/26
2024/02/14
en
You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
Alfred North Whitehead
Não soffras com paciencia; lucta com heroismo.
Simão, in Amor de Perdição, by Camillo Castello Branco.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16425
In modern-day Portuguese:
Não sofras com paciência; luta com heroísmo.
In English:
Do not you suffer with patience; struggle with heroism.
Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Such insight would stop progress.
Ivan Illich
https://archive.org/details/DeschoolingSociety/
gemini://thrig.me/blog/2023/11/09/more-on-education.gmi
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
The further away I am from the human race, the better I feel. Even though I write about the human race, the further away I am from them, the better I feel. Two inches is great, two miles is great. 2000 miles is beautiful. As long as I'm able to eat. They feed me because I feed them. But I don't like to be near them. When somebody even brushes against me with an elbow, in a crowd, I react. I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads. I don't like their faces. I don't like their feet. I don't like their conversations. I don't like their hairdos. I don't like their automobiles. I don't like their dogs or their cats or their roses.
Charles Bukowski
While some desert areas are lifeless, in most communities of animals, birds, insects, bacteria and plants run, fly, crawl, spread and grow in lives unordered, undomesticated by civilisation. Wildness is in us and all around us. The battle to contain and control it is the constant labour of civilisation. When that battle is lost and the fields are deserted, wildness persists.
From "Desert".
wiki/book.anonymous.desert.gmi
Oh, my good friend, how feeble is the imagination of men. They always think that people commit suicide for a reason. But one can very well commit suicide for two reasons.
From "The Fall", by Albert Camus.
wiki/book.albert_camus.fall.gmi
Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.
You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.
Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we… yes, I assure you… we should be begging to be under control again at once.
From "Notes from Underground", by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
wiki/book.fyodor_dostoyevsky.notes_from_underground.gmi
We know that the train carries all loads, so after getting on it why should we carry our small luggage on our head to our discomfort, instead of putting it down in the train and feeling at ease?
Under the tree the shade is pleasant; out in the open the heat is scorching. A person who has been going about in the sun feels cool when he reaches the shade. Someone who keeps on going from the shade into the sun and then back into the shade is a fool. A wise man stays permanently in the shade.
From "Who Am I?", questions 18 and 24, respectively.
wiki/book.bhagavan_sri_ramana_maharshi.who_am_i.gmi
Floki:
This is your fault, Ragnar.
Torstein has died fighting for a hill he did not want to own. For something which meant nothing to him. He has died a pointless death.
How many more of us must die for your Christians? Or have you, in your heart, already renounced our gods and turned to the Christ God? Is that what your friend Athelstan has persuaded you to do?
Ragnar:
[funny face: wtf are you talking about?]
Floki:
But look. Here we are. Under an English sky. Burying our dead. Those we have sacrificed for Jesus Christ.
Ragnar:
We're all fated to die on a certain day, yes? But it is our own choice to do as we please until that day comes.
I did not force Torstein, or any of you, to come, for that matter. You all chose to be here.
My heart is as heavy for Torstein as anyone's, but I am sure that I will bump into him again soon.
And in the meantime, Floki, shut your face.
Floki and Ragnar, from Vikings S03E03.
After Ragnar was finished talking Floki looked convinced and trust restored.
If one desires to be happy, sir, one must never understand duty; for, as soon as one has comprehended it, it is implacable.
Jean Valjean to Marius Pontmercy, from Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
6.371: At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
God's power we allow is infinite: But neither man nor any other animal are happy: Therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of nature tends not to human or animal felicity: Therefore it is not established for that purpose. Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. In what respect, then, do his benevolence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of men?
From Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
From Animal Farm, by George Orwell
This one is somewhat longer, and it's not someone's or some character's quote,
but it's a good paragraph from a good book.
"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page. "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. _Not to be published_." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose -- well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily recondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes -- make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside of the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstances, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words _"Not to be published"_ drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed. "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
From Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
It's the triumph of superior reason to live with folks who don't have any.
Socrates, from Socrates, by Voltaire
Lenina shook her head. "Was and will make me ill," she quoted, "I take a gramme and only am."
Lenina, from Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
He who knows best best knows how little he knows.
Thomas Jefferson
Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.
Bill Nye
My transcription, possibly wrong:
おい、君は先、羊飼いの犬だと言ったな。犬でいいじゃないか。いい犬は羊を豊な牧草地へ導くことで、羊から多いに感謝されることもあるさ。
影山、梶に、人間の條件 から
The subtitle's translation:
Listen. So you think you'd just be a shepherd's dog. What's wrong with that? A good dog can lead the sheep to greener pastures and earn their gratitude.
Kageyama, to Kaji, from The Human Condition: No Greater Love