Jonas Andersson

“The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“You misunderstand me. I do not *fear* death. I *resent* it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”
― Tom Robbins

“The phenomenon that Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome... Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them... when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don't see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they'll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes... All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline -- an expectation of how things should be --and gauge the changes we see against that norm... It also can leave us , the public, unsure how to feel about conservation's supposedly feel-good success stories.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning; and when they cannot it's a sign our knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and when a Mathematical Reasoning can be had it's as great a folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark, when you have a Candle standing by you.”
― John Arbuthnot, The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot ... By G. A. Aitken. [With a bibliography.]