Jan > Jan's Quotes

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#1

“Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, “how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

tags: change

87 likes

#2

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

tags: civilization, philosophy

123 likes

#3

“The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?).”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

tags: black-history-month

7 likes

#4

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

tags: arcadia, beginning, tom-stoppard

83 likes

#5

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

tags: books

58 likes

#6

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: enjoy-life, fearlessness, live-in-the-moment

5491 likes

#7

“Function and man appear synonymous because the function can only be pointed toward by being the function. There is no being except in a mode of being. [...] Both scholar and Christian are functioning in identical ways, just under different metaphor, and both are evading the mechanics of being.”
― Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality

7 likes

#8

“We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.”
― Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit

11 likes

#9

“Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

tags: chance, order

9 likes

#10

“Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

13 likes

#11

“Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

tags: cuts, dissonance, familiarity

12 likes

#12

“What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

2 likes

#13

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

tags: believe, glittering-eyes, hidden, magic, secrets, unlikely-places, watch, world

12124 likes

#14

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

tags: awe, magic, perception, wonder

3570 likes

#15

“...disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business....”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

tags: humor, magic

1687 likes

#16

“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

tags: magic, technology

1245 likes

#17

“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.”
― Charles de Lint

tags: connectedness

891 likes

#18

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

tags: luck, magic, science

854 likes

#19

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
― Werner Herzog

tags: dreams, monsters, ocean, sleep

669 likes

#20

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
― Werner Herzog

75 likes

#21

“Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.”
― John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization

tags: ethics, government, morals

39 likes

#22

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

146 likes

#23

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

97 likes

#24

“Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

59 likes

#25

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

245 likes

#26

“We are touched by magic wands. For just a fraction of our day life is perfect, and we are absolutely happy and in harmony with the earth. The feeling passes much too quickly. But the memory – and the anticipation of other miracles – sustains us in the battle indefinitely.”
― John Nichols, A Fragile Beauty: John Nichols' Milagro Country

tags: beauty, earth, harmony, magic, miracles, nature, perfection, sustenance

9 likes

#27

“Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

228 likes

#28

“Ants, like human beings, can create civilizations without the use of reason.”
― Abbott Lawrence Lowell

7 likes

#29

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
― Omar Khayyám

tags: indelibility, poetry, regret, time

752 likes

#30

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

1513 likes

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