Cosmic Arcata

“Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep.

[published in 1900]”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel

“Once three men were confined in a pitch-dark prison. Two of the men were intelligent, but one of them was a simpleton who knew nothing at all: he couldn’t put his clothes on, he didn’t know how to eat; nothing. One of the intelligent men worked hard to teach the simpleton to dress himself, to eat, to hold a spoon, and so on. The other intelligent man did nothing at all. One day the hardworking man asked the indifferent one, “Why don’t you make some effort to help teach the simpleton?” The other replied, “In this darkness you’ll teach him nothing, no matter how many years you spend. I use my time thinking of ways to break a hole in the wall to let in the light. When that happens, he’ll learn on his own what he needs to know.”
― Beatrice Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales

“There are certain queer ones and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own... And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones