Tom > Tom's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
― Emerson M. Pugh

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.”
― Franz Kafka

“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.”
― Carl Jung

“Pain is a great philosopher, because it thinks constantly of how to get rid of itself and demands discipline.”
― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life

“You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“As man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines.” So said Paracelsus in the fifteenth century. The idea of the power of the mind is not new, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Around this time Jon wrote Full Catastrophe Living – the title is based on Alexis Zorbas in the film Zorba the Greek, played by Anthony Quinn, who says: ‘Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe!”
― Patrizia Collard, The Little Book of Mindfulness: 10 minutes a day to less stress, more peace

“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.”
― Alden Nowlan

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.”
― Dylan Thomas

“The maxim, "Nothing prevails but perfection," may be spelled PARALYSIS.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Do something meaningful. Or maybe just mean everything you do,” he said.”
― Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark