Austen Miller Aceituna > Austen's Quotes

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.

What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
― Charlemagne

“When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture—the critical role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs—to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental errors; most such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. (And the better part of Western literature, if literary theorist Harold Bloom’s idea of “creative misreading” is to be believed.) The molecules themselves don’t add anything new to the stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively transforming mental and cultural givens—for mutating our inherited memes. •         •         • At the risk of discrediting my own idea, I want to acknowledge that it owes a debt—how large I can’t say—to a psychoactive plant. The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. •”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“What did the apple get in return? A golden age: untold new varieties and half a world of new habitat.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a ‘good thing’, especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually ‘wants’ to evolve. Evolution”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy become.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World