Quote Digest

[tushantin]

And "every ice cream ever made" to Tushantin!

I don't get it. In Lovecraft's books, there are depressing endings. In Austen's books, every single woman gets married. In tushantin's books, every ice cream ever gets made?

Yup! And I get to have all of em. 

[tushantin]

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”

Finally, someone who agrees with me!

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

Thank you, Gandhi. I vow to make the whole world go insane!

[tushantin]

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”

“Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.”

[ZeaLitY]

From Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy:

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

It must return to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for leisure and feasting.

And the times when man cramps his stomach and the machine enlarges its out-put are the very times when the economists preach to us the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence and the dogma of work.

There is no more room for illusion as to the function of modern armies. They are permanently maintained only to suppress the “enemy within”.

...the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

What unknown wonders are contained in the “dark continent”! Fields are sown with elephants’ teeth, rivers of cocoanut oil are dotted with gold, millions of backsides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting cotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles from which they may learn the virtues of civilization.

Cannot the laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at ail, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of the economist: “Let us work, let us work to increase the national wealth.”

Under the old regime, the laws of the church guaranteed the laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays, during which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great crime of catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once it was in the saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced the week of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer have more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers from the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them under the yoke of work.

Protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less solicitous for the people’s rest. It dethroned the saints in heaven in order to abolish their feast days on earth.

And that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities. Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.

O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!

And from Cicero:

What honorable thing can come out of a shop? What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything called shop is unworthy an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must regard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the tank of slaves.

[alfadorredux]

Brought to mind by tush's remark in the Amusements thread:

When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of being childish, and the desire to be very grown up. —C.S. Lewis

[rushingwind]

"Poets were the first teachers of mankind."
-Horace

"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."
-Toni Morrison

[tushantin]

"Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid" ~Albert Einstein

[Thought]

The more we talk, the more I realize your awesomeness!

You’ll find I’m good at doing the impossible... It’s one of my specialties.

I already saved the world. It only took me one book, I’ll add.

[tushantin]

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change a nation; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

-Dr. Margaret Mead

Satyameva Jayate!

[Kodokami]

Fond of bow ties & hats. Handbag is bigger on the inside. Talks to variety of creatures. Evidence Mary Poppins is a Time Lord

[utunnels]

...The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing - the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness. Though men hail it as reality, and band thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

...Time is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight of beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present and future. Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.

...What the denizens of few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which views the external world from various cosmic angles. As the Shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with the angles of cutting - being circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself - so do the local aspects of an unchanged - and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding.

[Thought]

Remember that when people are criticizing your writing, they are criticizing your writing. It's a reaction against your writing; it's not a reaction against you. The moment anyone starts criticizing you for your writing, you are allowed to start ignoring them, completely and utterly, forever.

[tushantin]

@utunnels: I wish I could "Like / Favourite" that post!

“Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.”

[tushantin]

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind...let it be something good.

[tushantin]

Egotism has no father; the moment one feels superior to others, his relations to humanity begins to deplete.

For those curious, this is an answer Shiva has to Brahma's suggestion that Daksh is his son (Creation) and he'll try to persuade him. This happens at a turning point in the story where King Daksh (and his dangerous pride) is the source of the calamity, waiting to happen like a ticking of a Time Bomb.