Phoenix > Phoenix's Quotes

“Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― Richard Brautigan, The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“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.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
-- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”
― George Carlin

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
― George Carlin

“All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.”
― John Steinbeck

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”
― Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

“Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.”
― Niklas Luhmann

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“Design cannot rescue failed content.”
― Edward R. Tufte

“The journey transforms the destination.”
― Peter Morville, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

“What we find changes who we become.”
― Peter Morville

“Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting.”
― Christopher W. Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

“...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Fasting Path: For Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical Healing and Renewal

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”
― MARY CATHERINE BATESON

“The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.”
― John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”
― Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“A fair realization of the incredible degree of the diversity of linguistic system that ranges over the globe leaves one with an inescapable feeling that the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our past experience on this planet; that the events of these recent millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played a little with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly longer past.”
― Benjamin Lee Whorf

“Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”
― Benjamin Lee Whorf