Tree of Heaven and Hell

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

~Carl Jung

Nature Versus God

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature that he has been destroying is this God he's worshiping.

~Hubert Reeves

Losers Brag About Their Best, Again

I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.

~Stephen Hawking, when asked about his IQ number

Losers Versus Winners

Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

~Sean Connery, The Rock

True Horrors of Human History

The true horrors of human history derive not from orcs or Dark Lords, but from ourselves.

George R.R. Martin

Corruption in the Belief of Superiority

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Leo Tolstoy on Insignificance

How good is it to remember one's insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in comparison with Sirius and others, and one's life span in comparison with billions on billions of ages. There is only one significance, you are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your reason and heart and expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately within you. But what the significance of the assignment is or of its completion, that you are not given to know, nor do you need to know it. It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire?

~Leo Tolstoy

People Who Find Sex Not the Most Interesting

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

~Aldous Huxley

Ernest Hemingway and the Traits of the Best People

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

~Ernest Hemingway

Acceptance and Rejection

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

~Ray Bradbury

Stupidity Versus Evil

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.

~Anatole France

Arrow Stops in Flight, If You Know What I'm Saying

"That's how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin' technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time's the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn't have anything t'do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It'll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin' decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem's the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred-meter timber or the equator--doesn't matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, sub-dividin' for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it, not for anyone. People have t'die, the body has t'fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin', thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."

~Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The School System Promotes Mediocrity

"I'm sure it did. But Grandfather's got oodles of money," said the girl. "Me too. I'm very well-off. I multiplied my inheritance and the life-insurance money I got on the stock market."

She took a key out of her pocket and opened the elevator door. Back into that overgrown vacu-pac elevator.

"Stock market?"

"Sure, Grandfather taught me the tricks. He taught me how to choose among all the information, how to read the market, how to dodge taxes, how to transfer funds to banks overseas, stuff like that. Stocks are a lot of fun. Ever tried?"

"Afraid not," I said. I'd never opened a fixed-term compounded-interest account.

The elevator moved at its requisite impossible ascending-or-descending speed.

"Grandfather says that schools are too inefficient to produce top material. What do you think?" she asked.

"Well, probably so," I answered. "I went to school for many years and I don't believe it made that much difference in my life. I can't speak many languages, can't play any instruments, can't play the stock market, can't ride a horse."

"So why don't you quit school? You could have quit any time you wanted, couldn't you?"

"I guess so," I said. "I could have quit, but I didn't want to. I guess it didn't occur to me to do anything like that. Unlike you, I had a perfectly average, ordinary upbringing. I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything."

"That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's not wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.

~Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Time and Effect: The Disproportions

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.

~Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Seductive Dressing

The clock read half past nine when she got out of bed, picked up her clothes from the floor, and slowly, leisurely, put them on. I stayed in bed, sprawled out, one elbow bent upright, watching her every move out of the corner of my eye. One piece of clothing at a time, liltingly graceful, not a motion wasted, achingly quiet. She zipped up her skirt, did the buttons of her blouse from the top down, lasty sat down on the bed to pull on her stockings. Then she kissed me on the cheek. Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress? Now completely composed, she ran her hand through her long black hair. All at once, the room breathed new air.

~Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Fools Versus Wise Men on Doing

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

~Niccolo Machiavelli

Not Just Lives Pass Away

The tomb in the day-time, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now, same days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silverplating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing which could pass away.

~Bram Stoker, Dracula

Your Certainty is Your Own

I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

~Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

The Most Important Science for Mankind to Know

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

~David Hume

Eric Haney on Combat

In combat, there are no winners. The victors just happen to lose less than the vanquished. One side may impose its will on the other, but there is nothing noble or virtuous about the process. People are killed and maimed, homes and communities destroyed, lives are shattered, families are broken apart and scattered to the wind--and just a few years later, we can barely remember why.

Eric L. Haney, Inside Delta Force

Think Life is Easy?

Life is warfare.

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, or simply Seneca

On Friends Who Stay or Go

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

Bernard Baruch

You are Measured by What You Do

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

~Robert Anton Wilson

Walt Whitman on Being

I exist as I am, that is enough.

~Walt Whitman

One Karate Kata Being the Foundation of It All

All is in Sanchin.

~Kanbun Uechi

A Good Prayer

Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery, teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit. Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my sacred space and love beyond my fear, and thus walk in balance with the passing of each glorious sun.

~Lakota Prayer

DFW on What Others Think

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

~David Foster Wallace

The Line Betwixt Life and Death

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

~Edgar Allan Poe

Uncle Ben Lives On

With great power comes great responsibility.

~Uncle Ben Parker, Spider-Man

The Foundation of My Bible

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson