ODDS & ENDS: Gifts, Country Music, Language

On Gifts
"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert

On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard

"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley

"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart

"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter

On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love

"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche

Johnny Cash, The Man in Black


From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash

From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video

From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video

From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video

ODDS & ENDS: Warriors, Fear, The Bible, Wisdom, Spiritual Evolution, Happiness

On Warriors
"The most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior may worry and think before making any decision, but once he makes it, he goes his way, free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting him. That’s the warrior’s way." - Carlos Castaneda

"The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn’t permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor for anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him." - Carlos Castaneda

"The Indian did not think of the wolf as a warrior in the same sense as he thought of himself as a warrior, but he respected the wolf’s stamina and stoicism and he encouraged these qualities in himself and others. The wolf, therefore, was incorporated into the ceremonies and symbology of war." - Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

On Fear
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
- Bene Gesserit, Dune

"Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed." -Hunter S. Thompson

"True terror is to wake up one morning & discover that your high school class is running the country." - Kurt Vonnegut

On the Bible
"And the truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope - and many believe - that they are made in the very image of God." - Barry Moser

"I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children? I think that some of the images in this Bible will be disturbing to a lot of people. The Bible is a very disturbing book." - Barry Moser

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little star-bursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes." - W.C. Fields

"There's nothing written in the Bible, Old or New testament, that says, 'If you believe in Me, you ain't going to have no troubles.' " - Ray Charles

"I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right." - Billy Graham

Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World


Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom and the Remoralization of Professional Life


George Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution

From TED
Technology and Faith with Billy Graham (Video)

From The Atlantic
What Makes Us Happy by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Article on George Vaillant)