On the Road"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began
Now far ahead the Road has gone
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet
And whither then? I cannot say."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
On Darkness
"And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained pale eggs of the beast. Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clam shell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure…" - Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
On Showing Up
"It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say." - Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect
On Diversity
"Diverse groups of problem solvers - groups of people with diverse tools - consistently outperformed groups of the best and the brightest. If I formed two groups, one random (and therefore diverse) and one consisting of the best individual performers, the first group almost always did better. Diversity trumped ability." - Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies Diversity
On Learning the Hard Way
"The native Americans have a magnificent tradition about scars. I have heard the tradition said this way: 'When you die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world.' That story moves awfully fast but it certainly defends the value of scars." - Robert Bly
On Lying
"Above all, I would teach him to tell the truth. Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: Every single one was a liar." - J. Edgar Hoover
"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." - H. L. Mencken
"The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else." - George Bernard Shaw
On Love & Kisses
"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender." - Emil Ludwig
On Good & Evil
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Robert Sapolsky, The Uniqueness of Humans
From FORA.tv
Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz: On Human Progress (Video)
From Jewish World Review
The Other Evil Eye by Yaffa Ganz
From Scientific American
Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative by Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira
No comments:
Post a Comment