Posts in the category “quotations”
One thing is that I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs, in different degrees of certainty, about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything and of many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
Richard P. Feynman
Happy Birthday, W. Somerset Maugham
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. W. Somerset Maugham, January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965
Live at Folsom Prison
One of my favorite albums — Johnny Cash’s Live at Folsom Prison — was released on this date in 1968. You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.
George Santayana
“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”
Caroline Gordon
One of my favorite quotes was first published two hundred and thirty-seven years ago today:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, Number I — December 18, 1776
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.I was born not knowing, and have only had a little time to change that here and there.
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
A Last Meal
I am increasingly convinced that a tremendous amount of yin and yang is important to a successful marriage. My wife and I have dramatically different opinions about dining, for example: She lives to eat. I eat to live. If you were to give each of us an hour to decide what we wanted for a