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"Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself"
by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
<html>Build a ritual around writing. Start well ahead of the actual act of writing, and continue the ritual after you've finished work. The idea is to make writing an integral part of a bigger picture. Let the cat out, make a cup of tea, feed the fish, put on some music, light a candle, write, check the mail, fix lunch, do the dishes. Doesn't seem quite so ominous when it's buried among all that other stuff, does it?
</html>
Source: [[50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work|http://sfwa.org/writing/strategies.html]]
"I have just delivered a State of the Family Room Address, sweeping in scope, visionary in strategy, inspirational to one and all, and the issue has now moved to committee. And though the committee has been looking at it from many angles, addressing matters of both provenance of the various elements of its unkemptness and matters of precisely who would be best suited to carry out the committee's recommendations, we are stalemated, solution-wise."
A solitary place, ideal for contemplative people, for those who love nature for what it is, making no distinction between sun and rain, heat and cold, wind and stillness, between the ease that some of these bring and that others withhold.
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Absence of gratitude is the mark of the narrow, uneducated mind.
Pasted from <http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dll/Magazines/Ensign/1988.htm/ensign%20august%201988.htm/first%20presidency%20message%20with%20all%20thy%20getting%20get%20understanding.htm>
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquainted_With_the_Night>
"'Which path shall I take?' Alice asks. The Chesire Cat answers, 'That depends where you want to go. If you don not know where you want to go, it doesn't really matter which path you take.'"
<html>Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds? </html>
Source: [[MichaelCrichton.com : Aliens Cause Global Warming|http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html]]
<html>We may never become accustomed to untrue and unjust criticism of us but we ought not to be immobilized by it</html>
Source: [[All Hell Is Moved - Neal A. Maxwell|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6170&x=24&y=10]]
<html><p>Obedience on our part can bring us face to face with new challenges which we need but do not want, challenges from which we may even be running away. Obedience helps us to pioneer beyond the past. Logic may look and tell us that the mountains ahead of us are stern Sierras, but obedience will cause us to press forward anyway over what finally prove to be simply rolling hills.
</p><p>
Therefore, practice emancipating obedience! Do not let your moods maul your faith. Do not allow the absence of social life and dates to color your attitude toward your rendezvous with the resurrection. Do not let a bad day cause you to think that life is bad. Do not let low self-esteem discount your high blessings. In short, do not homogenize your hopes by mixing and treating them as if all hopes and aspirations are equal. They are not. The hope for a resurrection is guaranteed unconditionally by the atonement of the Savior. The hope for a good grade on an exam is quite obviously a hope of a different order; it is of much less significance and it is by no means guaranteed.
</p></html>
Source: [[All Hell Is Moved - Neal A. Maxwell|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6170&x=24&y=10]]
<html>The gift of immortality to all mankind through the reality of the Resurrection is so powerful a promise that our rejoicing in these great and generous gifts should drown out any sorrow, assuage any grief, conquer any mood, dissolve any despair, and tame any tragedy. Those who now see life as pointless will one day point with adoration to the performance of the Man of Galilee in those crowded moments of time known as Gethsemane and Calvary. Those who presently say life is meaningless will yet applaud the Atonement which saves us from meaninglessness. Christ's victory over death ended the human predicaments, and from these too we may be rescued by following the teachings of him who rescued us from general extinction.</html>
Source: [[All Hell Is Moved - Neal A. Maxwell|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6170&x=24&y=10]]
<html>No one, brothers and sisters, would pay us much heed if we were merely nonsmoking, nondrinking humanists. </html>
Source: [[All Hell Is Moved - Neal A. Maxwell|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6170&x=24&y=10]]
Among the Things He Does Not Deserve by Dan Albergotti
Greek olives in oil, fine beer, the respect of colleagues,
the rapt attention of an audience, pressed white shirts,
just one last-second victory, sympathy, buttons made
to resemble pearls, a pale daughter, living wages, a father
with Italian blood, pity, the miraculous reversal of time,
a benevolent god, good health, another dog, nothing
cruel and unusual, spring, forgiveness, the benefit
of the doubt, the next line, cold fingers against his chest,
rich bass notes from walnut speakers, inebriation, more ink,
a hanging curve, great art, steady rain on Sunday, the purr
of a young cat, the crab cakes at their favorite little place,
the dull pain in his head, the soft gift of her parted lips.
"Among the Things He Does Not Deserve" by Dan Albergotti, from The Boatloads. (c) BOA Editions, 2008. Reprinted with permission.
<html>I have been rereading Robert Pirsig's <em>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</em>. This passage really sticks with me:<br><span style="font-family: arial;"><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial;">After a while he says, "Do you believe in ghosts?"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">"No," I say.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">"Why not?"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">"Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The way I say this makes John smile. "They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. "Of course," I add, "the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too."</span></p></blockquote></span></html>
Source: [[Greg Mankiw's Blog: An Epistemological Digression|http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/epistemological-digression.html]]
An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend
by Mei-Yao Ch'en
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Do not be offended because
I am slow to go out. You know
Me too well for that. On my lap
I hold my little girl. At my
Knees stands my handsome little son.
One has just begun to talk.
The other chatters without
Stopping. They hang on my clothes
And follow my every step.
I can't get any farther
Than the door. I am afraid
I will never make it to your house.
…as boys brought up in the freedom of the streets were once called, then angels with dirty faces, then rebels without a cause, now delinquents who are denied the benefits of either euphemism or metaphor. P 151
She says he isn't as funny as he used to be. About fifty percent as
funny, maybe less. He thinks, but doesn't say, no, it's you, you're
depressed, you don't find anyone funny anymore. She thinks, but
doesn't say, I've always been depressed. I've never found anyone
funny -- except you, once.
That last love poem I gave you, I want to apologize for that. It was
crudely put and several of the metaphors leaned too heavily on sea
life. I love you so much more than that. The best pan of the poem
was the beginning, and that had nothing to do with you, or me,
or how much either of us loves each other. It was just a line from
another, better poem. Most of the poem sounds defensive, like I've
been accused of not loving you, or you of not loving me. Not that
I think I don't love you, or you me. I don't. Still, one could read a
poem by someone else and it'd seem more authentic -- you'd be more
likely to think that poem was dedicated to you, I mean, than to think
mine was. One could even argue, too, that by studiously avoiding
your name or any identifying traits, I was making this poem fit for
more than one person, like women in general, or a second wife, or
your very attractive sister.
Appearances, while not always as deceptive as people say, not infrequently belie themselves, revealing new modes of being that open the door to the possibility of real changes in a pattern of behavior, which, generally speaking, had been assumed to be defined already. p12
Apply your heart to understanding. -- Abinidai 12:27
D&C 123:17
"Let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed."
"Knowing that she was beautiful she perceived, however indistinctly, that she was armed. Women play with beauty like children with a knife, and sometimes cut themselves." p 774
"'My friends, remember this, there are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.'" p 160
<html><p></p>
<a name="11"></a>
<p>“As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.</p>
<a name="12"></a>
<p>“And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.</p>
<a name="13"></a>
<p>“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;</p>
<a name="14"></a>
<p>“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (<a href="http://scriptures.lds.org/john/17/18-21#18" onclick="newWindow('http://scriptures.lds.org/john/17//18-21#18')" target="contentWindow" class="scriptureRef">John 17:18–21</a>).</p>
<a name="15"></a>
<p>In those few words He made clear how the gospel of Jesus Christ can allow hearts to be made one. Those who would believe the truth He taught could accept the ordinances and the covenants offered by His authorized servants. Then, through obedience to those ordinances and covenants, their natures would be changed. The Savior’s Atonement in that way makes it possible for us to be sanctified. We can then live in unity, as we must to have peace in this life and to dwell with the Father and His Son in eternity.</p></html>
Source: [[LDS.org - Liahona Article - Be One|http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=f318118dd536c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=c0c6bf9cd2f0c110VgnVCM100000176f620a____&hideNav=1]]
"To thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." -- Shakespeare
"Be fortunate and you will be thought great." p 64
"The Spirit is the most important single element in this work. With the Spirit magnifying your call, you can do miracles for the Lord in the mission field. Without the Spirit, you will never succeed, regardless of your talent and ability." -- Ezra Taft Benson
"'Woman! Exclaimed Tholomyes. 'Beware of woman! Woe to him who trusts himself to her inconstant heart. Woman is perfidious and devious. She hates the serpent as a professional rival. The serpent is in the house across the way.'" p 136
[Jean Val Jean has just stolen the bishop's silver and escaped. He was caught by the police and brought back to the church. Bishop Bienvenu responds.] "'So here you are!' he cried to Valjean. 'I'm delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They're silver like the rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?'
[The bishop covers for Valjean.] The gendarmes withdrew. Valjean stayed motionless as though he were on the verge of collapse. The bishop came up to him and said in a low voice:
'Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.'
Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:
'Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.'" p 110-111
is kernels of juice
blue, mom makes it do
magic heat to vanilla ice cream
purple dream
there were many nice things,
the corduroy pinafore
the daily notes in lunch sack
of a smiley face and curly cue hair
your mama loves you, and do great
with a thermos of homemade soup
dad too, he rocked me on front porch
after seven yellow jacket stings
i howled through the valley
in baking soda paste
while he sang, in the big rock candy mountain...
but just like grandma vernon always said
don't bother doing anything nice for your children
they'll only remember the bad things, anyway
like when she tethered my dad
to the front yard tree
so he could play when she was at work
was that bad? a ruined childhood?
bless her heart
and pie too, is sometimes
tart
When individuals attempt to verbalize their experience, they further interpret by using a conceptual framework of language. Concepts affect how we perceive, however, even before we interpret and explain. The way we conceptualize the world influences how we will perceive it. Further, language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of various items of experience, it also contains a creative, symbolic organization which not only refers to experiences already acquired but actually defines experience. Language constitutes a logic, a general framework within which we categorize reality (Bishin and Stone, 1972, 159). Anyoone who has learned to think in another language knows that there are expressions and nuances of thought that cannot be translated into English, for the cultural frame of reference necessary to understand the concept is missing. As Michael Polanyi (1962) noted, culture and language entail a tacit knowledge which impacts upon how we conceptualize experience. We assume a structure of reality in the act of attempting to communicate about our experience.
These observations about experience are crucial to understanding revelation, but they are not the total explanation of revelation. If they were, nothing new could be learned in revelation; revelation would be a mere restatement of cultural and preconceptual presuppositions. Revelation is not experienced from God's viewpoint, free of cultural biases and conceptual limitations, but neither is God limited to adopting existing world views or paradigms to convey his message. Revelation is also a revolution in human thought, a real breakthrough that makes new understanding possible. In Mormon theology, revelation is necessarily experienced within a divine-human relationship that respects the dignity of human freedom. God does not coerce us to see him as God; that is left to the freedom of human faith. Revelation cannot coerce us because the divine influence is, of metaphysical and moral necessity, persuasive and participative rather than controlling. We exercise an eternal and inherent freedom even in relation to God. Revelation becomes a new creation, emerging from the synthesis of divine and human interaction. Revelation is part human experience, part divine disclosure, part novelty. It requires human thought and creativity in response to divine lure and message (Cobb and Griffin 1976, 101-5).
The ultimate reality in Mormon thought is not an omnipotent God coercing passive and powerless prophets to see his point of view. God acts upon the individual and imparts his will and message, but receiving the message and internalizing it is partly up to the individual. In this view, revelation is not an intrusion of the supernatural into the natural order. It is human participation with God in creating human experience itself. Revelation is not the filling of a mental void with divine content. It is the synthesis of a human and divine event. The prophet is an active participant in revelation, conceptualizing and verbalizing God's message in a framework of thought meaningful to the people. Human freedom is as essential to revelation as God's disclosure.
This creative co-participation theory of revelation resolves the tension between propositional and experiential understandings of revelation. As Edward Schillebeeckx noted: "Religious language only becomes valid in a full context of experience of this language -- both linguistic and non-linguistic. The demand means that the propositional understanding of revelation cannot be excluded, but must be kept in a right relation to the experience with which this propositional language is associated." (1983, 54). To adequately and properly interpret scripture and religious doctrine, we must understand the entire structure of the paradigm or world view from which its experience with God is expressed. No element of the paradigm can be rightly understood unless we also understand how it relates to other concepts entailed in the paradigm. Understanding the dominant paradigms operative in the Book of Mormon is essential to understand its message.
"He was still pacing the room, with the blood beating violently at his temples."
"He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends." p 159
"Church members who seek spiritual guidance or have weighty personal problems should make a diligent effort, including earnest prayer and scripture study, to find solutions and answers themselves."
"Every man dies, not every man really lives."
[speaking of all the ways people cheat others to enrich themselves] "all this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud." p 64
"We are so wound up in programs and statistics and trends, in properties, lands and mammon, and in achieving goals that will highlight the excellence of our work, that we have omitted the weightier matters of the law."
"'The brutalities progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled but that it has advanced.'" p 56
<html>When half of mankind seems lifted by hope, nothing looks meaner than to disparage the dream. But what is this Obama mania? The world did not change for ever on Tuesday. No messiah has come among us. Miracles have not become possible. There is no new dawn. Calm down dear, it's only a US presidential election.</html>
Source: [[Calm down! He's not President of the World : Matthew Parris - Times Online|http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5109994.ece]]
<html>Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.<br>
-Catch 22</html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital - Sage|chrome://sage/content/feedsummary.html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flongorshortcapital.com%2Ffeed%2Fatom%2F]]
"Things that don't change remain the same."
"What was certain, although he did not realize it, was that t he was no longer the same man. Everything in him was changed. It was no longer in his power to behave as though the bishop had not spoken to him and touched his heart." p 116
"When the man saw what the animal had done, Jean Valjean recoiled with a cry of horror." p 117
"Jean Valjean wept for a long time, sobbing convulsively with more than a woman's abandon, more than the anguish of a child. And as he wept a new day dawned in his spirit, a day both wonderful and terrible. He saw all things with a clarity that he had never known before." p 118
"His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in a rock, there may be channels hollowed buy the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed." p 66
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered. P 98
"Anything can be achieve in small, deliberate steps. But there are times you need the courage to take a great leap; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
~ David Lloyd George
“Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.”
-George Santayana
[[China’s September data suggest that the long-term overcapacity problem is only intensifying|http://mpettis.com/2009/10/china%e2%80%99s-september-data-suggest-that-the-long-term-overcapacity-problem-is-only-intensifying/]]
"As a people there is a moment when God taps you on the shoulder and calls you to some great work, and if you are prepared it will be your finest hour." -- Winston Churchill
not the right quote, but i should find it.
"To every man there comes that special moment when his is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a special thing unique to him and fitted to his talent. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for the work which would be his finest hour." -- Winston Churchill
In all, between 167 million and 188 million people died because of organized violence in the twentieth century -- as many as one in every 22 deaths in that period.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
The conflict, Trotsky wrote, "shows that we still haven't crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials, and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on a rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter."
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
Why so destructive:
1. Powerful weapons -- genocides in central africa perpetrated by rifles, axes, and machetes.
2. Economics -- discounted, before growth, after growth, etc
3. Extreme ideology -- not alone in extreme ideologies, why now?
4. Tyrants -- the command, but who follows?
5. Type of government -- democracies don't go to war. Maybe between states, but what about civil wars to establish those democracies. It is easy to view US founding war as a revolution, why is it a deragorty statement when we say it about modern africa, but not about america? If the south had suceded, wouldn't theirs have been a war of emancipation. Stalin, Mao, hitler, internal purgings.
Not comparitively among centuries, but why among nations. (trade doesn't hurt countries, it hurts stakeholders).
Causes ethnic disintegration, economic volitility, and empires in decline.
Ethnic.
Assimilation, however, can be violently reversed.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
Ethnic minorities in such countries suddenly found themselves treated as second-class citizens.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
The most violent year in the entire history of British India was 1947, when partition led to the deaths of more than a million people in communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
The good news is that global economic volatility has been significantly lower in recent years than at almost any time in the last century. By widening and deepening international markets for goods, labor, and capital, globalization appears to have made the world economy less prone to crisis. At the same time, financial innovations have improved the pricing and the distribution of risk, and policy innovations such as inflation targeting have helped governments to limit rises in consumer price (if not asset price) inflation. International organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund have helped to avert trade disputes and other sources of economic instability.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
Those who engaged in ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century, whether by forced migration or genocide, did their work too well, so that today central and eastern Europe (and Manchuria and Korea) are no longer ethnically heterogeneous.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
Today, one region displays in abundance all of the characteristics of the worst conflict zones of the twentieth century. Economic volatility has remained pronounced there even as it has diminished in the rest of the world. An empire (albeit one that dares not speak its name) is losing its grip over the region. Worst of all, ethnic disintegration is already well under way, even though many commentators still conceive of what is currently the main conflict there as an insurgency against foreign invaders or a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.
Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85506/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world.html?mode=print>
"In times of darkness, remember there is a difference between passing local cloud cover and general darkness." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"For he seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye." -- C.S. Lewis
"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
"Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death."
"It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you start running."
<html> It’s amazing how many
pressing concerns are literally of the moment. They won’t matter in six months,
and certainly not in six years. And if they won’t matter then, are they really
worth our attention now?</html>
Source: [[MichaelCrichton.com : Complexity Theory and Environmental Management|http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-complexity.html]]
[speaking of knowledge and conscience] "'They are the same thing. Conscience is the amount of inner knowledge that we possess.'" p 52
<html><p>Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. </p>
<p>Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.<br>
-Michael Crichton on Global Warming</p></html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital » Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 11-09-2008 - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06|http://longorshortcapital.com/quotes-entirely-relevant-to-investing-11-09-2008-crichton.htm]]
"'…I would not care to live with all this luxury around me, constantly reminding me that there are people who are cold and hungry. There are the poor! There are the poor!'" p 60
D&C 49:26-29
"Behold, I say unto you, go forth as I have commanded: repent of all your sins; ask and ye shall receive; knock and it shall be opened unto you."
"Behold, I will go before you and be your rearward; and I will be in your midst, and you shall not be confounded."
"Behold, I am Jesus Christ, and I come quickly."
[quoting a message from Khrushchev to Kennedy concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis]: We and you ought not pull on the ends of a rope in which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence."
<html>In one of his last published <a href="http://kottke.org/07/10/the-best-american-essays-2007" target="_blank">writings</a> (how terrible it feels to put it that way) David Foster Wallace referred to “the sound of our U.S. culture right now” as Total Noise: “a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen – at least that’s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.... In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it.”</html>
Source: [[D.F.W., R.I.P. :|http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/09/17/mclemee]]
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
"...this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered."
-- like the way he uses "why not"
"They believe, though not too vocally, that so-called difficult books can exist next to, can even rub bindings suggestively with, more welcoming fiction.'
-- like "rub bindings suggestively"
"He was already known as a very smart and challenging and funny and preternaturally gifted writer when Infinite Jest was released in 1996, and thereafter his reputation included all the adjectives mentioned just now, and also this one: Holy shit."
-- like "holy shit"
"No, that isn’t an adjective in the strictest sense. But you get the idea."
-- like "not adj in strictest sense"
"That it was written in three years by a writer under 35 is very painful to think about. So let’s not think about that. The point is that it’s for all these reasons—acclaimed, daunting, not-lazy, drum-tight, very funny (we didn’t mention that yet but yes) — that you picked up this book."
-- ha, spends a lot of time "not thinking about it"
Theme of book: "...for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility."
"The answer is: maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way."
-- Nice stataccato.
Source: [[|http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/50552]]
The memoir reads like a David-and-Goliath story. It isn’t. David changed the rules on Goliath. He brought a slingshot to a sword fight.
<html>“My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.”</html>
Source: [[Life and Letters: The Unfinished: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker|http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all]]
<html><p>There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"</p>
<p>This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the
deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story
["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty
conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present
myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you
younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish.
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important
realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal
platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult
existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so
I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
</p></html>But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
Source: [[David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College|http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html]]
<html><dt class="quote"><a title="Click for further information about this quotation" href="/quote/36449.html">Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.</a> </dt><dd class="author"><div class="icons"><a title="Further information about this quotation" href="/quote/36449.html"><img src="/icon_info.gif" alt="[info]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Add to Your Quotations Page" href="/myquotations.php?add=36449"><img src="/icon_plus.gif" alt="[add]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Email this quotation" href="/quote/36449.html#email"><img src="/icon_email.gif" alt="[mail]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><img src="/icon_blank.gif" alt="" border="0" height="16" width="16"></div><b><a href="/quotes/David_Sedaris/">David Sedaris</a></b></dd></html>
Source: [[Quotation Search - Quote Search - The Quotations Page|http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=journal&startsearch=Search]]
It's early, he murmured, and by this he meant, as became immediately apparent, that he still had time to punish himself for his frivolity in having exchanged obligation for devotion, the authentic for the false, the enduring for the transient. p13
"In an intimacy which nothing could ever make more perfect they told each other of all that was most secret and hidden in themselves, recounting, with an innocent trust in their illusions, everything that love and youth, and the vestiges of childhood that still clung to them, put into their heads. Two hearts were exchanged, so that when an hour had passed they were a youth enriched with the soul of a girl and a girl enriched with a young man's soul. Each pervaded, enchanted, and enraptured the other." p 810
"And finally, that nothing might be lacking in that ravishing countenance, a nose that was not beautiful but pretty, not straight or curved, Italian or Greek - a Parisian nose, which means one that is lively and sensitive, irregular and as nature made it, the despair of painters and the delight of poets." p 606
The mannequins are all in love with you
and too depressed to say it. The cashier
flirts with another cashier, who eyes you,
who eyes the sales rack of wool pants.
Behind each mirror hunches an old man
watching women adjust their skirts,
their sunglasses, their hair. Small dogs disappear
on the escalator. Everyone leans forward
at the perfume counter, asking to be touched.
"Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. Having penetrated to those depths, having groped in the heart of darkness, he had found and grasped a diamond of truth that now lays gleaming in his hand." p 218
"When we are pushed, stung, defeated, embarrassed, hurt, rejected, tormented, forgotten - when we are in agony of Spirit crying out 'Why me?' we are in a position to learn something." Unknown
Dirge Without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
There are plenty of reasons to think that the more we try to drive our imaginations away, the more they will amuse themselves by seeking out and attacking those points in our armor that, consciously or unconsciously, we left unprotected. p
"He was driving through the darkness as though into an abyss. Something thrust him forward and something drew him on.. His state of mind was such as no words can describe but all men will understand. Is there any man who, once at least in his life, has not found himself in that blackness of uncertainty? He had resolved nothing, decided nothing, settled nothing. Out of all his agonies of conscience no finality had emerged. More than ever he was back where he had started." p 225
<html>Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
"The Thud of Ideas," <i>The New Yorker</i> (<span class="mw-formatted-date" title="1950-09-23"><a href="/wiki/1950" title="1950">1950</a>-<a href="/wiki/September_23" title="September 23">09-23</a></span></html>
Source: [[E. B. White - Wikiquote|http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White]]
<html>Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.</html>
Source: [[E. B. White Quotes|http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/authors/e__b__white_quotes.html]]
<html>His words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.</html>
Source: [[E. B. White Quotes|http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/authors/e__b__white_quotes.html]]
<html>Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.</html>
Source: [[E. B. White Quotes|http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/authors/e__b__white_quotes.html]]
<html>If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savour) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.</html>
Source: [[E. B. White Quotes|http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/authors/e__b__white_quotes.html]]
<html>“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than a whole one”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“Be obscure clearly.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/]]
<html>“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/2.html]]
<html>“Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/3.html]]
<html>“I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating."”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/4.html]]
<html>“There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/4.html]]
<html>“She would write 8 or 10 words, then draw her gun and shoot them down.”</html>
Source: [[E. B. White quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._b._white/4.html]]
"…her life would be one of celebrity mixed with pathos, fame sprung from tragedy."
innumerable sins both Catholic and karmic
Leavened earnestness
"Out of clutter, find simplicity.
"From discord, find harmony.
"In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
<html><dt class="quote"><a title="Click for further information about this quotation" href="/quote/3238.html">Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.</a> </dt><dd class="author"><div class="icons"><a title="Further information about this quotation" href="/quote/3238.html"><img src="/icon_info.gif" alt="[info]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Add to Your Quotations Page" href="/myquotations.php?add=3238"><img src="/icon_plus.gif" alt="[add]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Email this quotation" href="/quote/3238.html#email"><img src="/icon_email.gif" alt="[mail]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><img src="/icon_blank.gif" alt="" border="0" height="16" width="16"></div><b><a href="/quotes/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson/">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a> (1803 - 1882)</b>, <i>'Journals,' 1836</i></dd></html>
Source: [[Quotation Search - Quote Search - The Quotations Page|http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=journal&page=2]]
<html><dt class="quote"><a title="Click for further information about this quotation" href="/quote/26762.html">Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.</a> </dt><dd class="author"><div class="icons"><a title="Further information about this quotation" href="/quote/26762.html"><img src="/icon_info.gif" alt="[info]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Add to Your Quotations Page" href="/myquotations.php?add=26762"><img src="/icon_plus.gif" alt="[add]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Email this quotation" href="/quote/26762.html#email"><img src="/icon_email.gif" alt="[mail]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><img src="/icon_blank.gif" alt="" border="0" height="16" width="16"></div><b><a href="/quotes/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson/">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a> (1803 - 1882)</b>, <i>Journal (May 1849)</i></dd></html>
Source: [[Quotation Search - Quote Search - The Quotations Page|http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=journal&page=3]]
<html> There was almost no plot of grassy space left on campus that had not been filled with the hulking form of yet another architectural monument to the pride and vanity of some self-fellating panjandrum.</html>
Source: [[The Epicurean Dealmaker: Et in Arcadia Ego|http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2008/11/et-in-arcadia-ego.html]]
<html>My view, which you are welcome to classify under Education, Gratuitous Unverified Crackpot Theories Of, is that private educational institutions have been able to charge whatever the hell they want to for so long because Education has become the new Religion of the socially ambitious. There is almost no other way to classify the fervor, zealotry, and passion with which the parents and children of upwardly mobile classes pursue, discuss, and glorify the imprimatur of an Ivy League or equivalent degree, and the supposedly necessary interim steps thereto.</html>
Source: [[The Epicurean Dealmaker: Et in Arcadia Ego|http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2008/11/et-in-arcadia-ego.html]]
<html>The skeptics among you will no doubt remain unconvinced, but I find it somehow revealing (and disturbing) that President Faust makes a point in her letter of mentioning that families with incomes between $60,000 and $180,000 per year "and typical assets" can expect to pay around 10 percent of their income as tuition to the Great Red Mother. Tithing to Harvard: some cultural forms never change, do they?</html>
Source: [[The Epicurean Dealmaker: Et in Arcadia Ego|http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2008/11/et-in-arcadia-ego.html]]
"Associate with those who like you are planning not for temporary convenience, shallow goals, or narrow ambition, but rather for those things that matter most--eternal objectives." -- Neal A. Maxwell
<html><a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/282.html" target="_blank">H.L. Mencken once remarked</a> that there is a "well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."</html>
Source: [[The real reason ethanol won't—and can't—cut American oil imports. - By Robert Bryce - Slate Magazine|http://www.slate.com/id/2202314/]]
"If you say, with full heart, everytime you receive a commandment: I am God's servant, I will humbly obey' the honest in heart will know that you are a servant of Jesus Christ, the elect will be led to you." (pieced together) -- Henry B. Eyring
"Because faith is wanting, the fruits are." -- Joseph Smith
"You have heard it said that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried." -- James E. Faust
"He had, it seems, concluded, after the manner of saints and sages, that his first duty was not to himself." p 209
<html>And ultimately I concluded, in <em>The War of the World</em>, that three factors made the location and timing of lethal organized violence more or less predictable in the last century. The first factor was ethnic disintegration: Violence was worst in areas of mounting ethnic tension. The second factor was economic volatility: The greater the magnitude of economic shocks, the more likely conflict was. And the third factor was empires in decline: When structures of imperial rule crumbled, battles for political power were most bloody. </html>
Source: [[Foreign Policy: The Axis of Upheaval|http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4681]]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6249980
The freedom of speech should include the right to offend.
"To understand all is to forgive all." -- French Proverb
From blossoms comes
Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
"Faith - the kind of faith that moves one to get on his knees and plead with the Lord and then get on his feet and got to work - is an asset beyond compare."
"Productive labor is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic realities." -- Gordon B. Hinckley
"Great buildings were never constructed on uncertain foundations. Great causes were never brought to success by vacillating leaders. Personal testimony coupled with performance cannot be refuted."
"What more could he need, this old man whose little leisure was divided between daytime gardening and night-time contemplation? Was not the narrow space with the sky its ceiling room enough for the worship of God in the most delicate of His works and in the most sublime? A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in - what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars." p 68
"You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it: I never saved anything for the swim back." [Explaining how he beat his brother swimming.]]
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.
"The bishop touched him on the arm and said, 'Monsier le Marquis, you must indeed give me something.' The marquis turned away, saying curtly, 'Monsiegneur, I have my own poor.' 'Give them to me,' said the bishop." p 28-29
"What is to give light must endure burning."
~ Viktor Frankl
<html> I know that may sound presumptuous, but a philosopher once said, "Tell me sufficiently why a thing should be done, and I will move heaven and earth to do it." </html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html>"Fire and Ice": "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire."</html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html><span class="p_tagged"><a href="#" id="a_34" onclick="scrollPosition = getYOffset();this.style.display='none';; new Ajax.Request('/notebook/open_popup?doc=17280&para=34', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:'authenticity_token=' + encodeURIComponent('c2d5555afd38e3d16af8a6ecd6043ff479a98082')}); return false;"></a></span><span class="pg">190</span>Can you see then the moral schizophrenia that comes from pretending we are one, sharing the physical symbols and physical intimacy of our union, but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects—and symbols—of what was meant to be a total obligation, only to unite again furtively some other night or, worse yet, furtively unite (and you can tell how cynically I use that word) with some other partner who is no more bound to us, no more one with us than the last was or than the one that will come next week or next month or next year or anytime before the binding commitments of marriage?</html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html><span class="p_tagged"><a href="#" id="a_35" onclick="scrollPosition = getYOffset();this.style.display='none';; new Ajax.Request('/notebook/open_popup?doc=17280&para=35', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:'authenticity_token=' + encodeURIComponent('c2d5555afd38e3d16af8a6ecd6043ff479a98082')}); return false;"></a></span><span class="pg">190</span>You must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot give everything until you are at least legally and, for Latter-day Saint purposes, eternally pronounced as one. To give illicitly that which is not yours to give (remember, "you are not your own") and to give only part of that which cannot be followed with the gift of your whole heart and your whole life and your whole self is its own form of emotional Russian roulette. If you persist in sharing part without the whole, in pursuing satisfaction devoid of symbolism, in giving parts and pieces and inflamed fragments only, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage that you may undermine both your physical intimacy and your wholehearted devotion to a truer, later love. You may come to that moment of real love, of total union, only to discover to your horror that what you should have saved has been spent and that only God's grace can recover that piecemeal dissipation of your virtue.</html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html><p id="36">A good Latter-day Saint friend, Dr. Victor L. Brown, Jr., has written of this issue:</p>
<p id="37"><span class="p_tagged"><a href="#" id="a_37" onclick="scrollPosition = getYOffset();this.style.display='none';; new Ajax.Request('/notebook/open_popup?doc=17280&para=37', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:'authenticity_token=' + encodeURIComponent('c2d5555afd38e3d16af8a6ecd6043ff479a98082')}); return false;"></a></span><span class="pg">191</span>"Fragmentation enables its users to counterfeit intimacy.. . . If we relate to each other in fragments, at best we miss full relationships. At worst, we manipulate and exploit others for our gratification. Sexual fragmentation can be particularly harmful because it gives powerful physiological rewards which, though illusory, can temporarily persuade us to overlook the serious deficits in the overall relationship. Two people may marry for physical gratification and then discover that the illusion of union collapses under the weight of intellectual, social, and spiritual incompatibilities. . . . </p>
<p id="38"><span class="p_tagged"><a href="#" id="a_38" onclick="scrollPosition = getYOffset();this.style.display='none';; new Ajax.Request('/notebook/open_popup?doc=17280&para=38', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:'authenticity_token=' + encodeURIComponent('c2d5555afd38e3d16af8a6ecd6043ff479a98082')}); return false;"></a></span><span class="pg">191</span>"Sexual fragmentation is particularly harmful because it is particularly deceptive. The intense human intimacy that should be enjoyed in and symbolized by sexual union is counterfeited by sensual episodes which suggest—but cannot deliver—acceptance, understanding, and love. Such encounters mistake the end for the means as lonely, desperate people seek a common denominator which will permit the easiest, quickest gratification." <i>(Human Intimacy: Illusion & Reality</i> [Salt Lake City: Parliament Publishers, 1981], pp. 5-6.)</p></html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html>"It has been declared in the solemn word of revelation, that the spirit and the body constitute the soul of man; and, therefore, we should look upon this body as something that shall endure in the resurrected state, beyond the grave, something to be kept pure and holy. Be not afraid of soiling its hands; be not afraid of scars that may come to it if won in earnest effort, or [won] in honest fight, but beware of scars that disfigure, that have come to you in places where you ought not have gone, that have befallen you in unworthy undertakings [pursued where you ought not have been]; beware of the wounds of battles in which you have been fighting on the wrong side." <i>(Conference Report,</i> October 1913, p. 117.)</html>
Source: [[GospeLink.com - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments|http://gospelink.com/library/document/17280]]
<html>“<a class="sqq" href="/quotation/wake-at-dawn-with-a-winged-heart-and-give-thanks/411411.html">Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.</a>”</html>
Source: [[Gratitude quotes|http://thinkexist.com/quotations/gratitude/]]
"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that lowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
"Age is no threat to the great men of the mind. With Dantes and the Michelangelos, to grow older is to grow: is it to shrink, in the case of the Hannibbals and the Bonapartes?" p 286
"A great teacher never strives to explain her vision; she simply invites you to stand beside her and see for yourself."
~ The Rev. R. Inman
"Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity."
~ Hippocrates, Precepts, Ch. 1
"Christ says: 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time, or so much of your money, or so much of your work, I want YOU. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want the tree down. I don't to drill the tooth or crown it, I want it out. Hand over your whole natural self, all the desires, the ones you think are innocent as well as the ones you think are wicked. You give me the whole outfit and I will give you a new self. In fact, I will give you myself and my will shall become your will." -- Jeffery R. Holland
"Faith in every footstep…one step at a time. That is how tasks are accomplished, that is how goals are achieved, and that is how frontiers are conquered. In more divine language, that is how worlds are created and that is how your world will be created.
"God expects you to have enough faith and determination and enough trust in Him to keep moving, keep living, keep rejoicing. In fact He expects you not simply to face the future (that sounds grim and stoic); He expects you to embrace and shape the future - to love it and rejoice in it and delight in your opportunities.
"God is anxiously waiting for the chance to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, just as He always has. But He can't if you don't pray, and He can't if you don't dream. In short, He can't if you don't believe."
"Opposition turns up anywhere something good has happened.
"Once there has been genuine illumination, beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it, and trusted it and lived for it, it's right now. Don't give up when the pressure mounts. Don't five in to that being who is bent on the destruction of your happiness. Face your doubts, master your fears, cast not away therefore your confidence. Stay the course and see the beauty of life unfold for you.
"After you've gotten the message, after you've paid the price, to feel his love and hear the word of the Lord, go forward, don't fear, don't vacillate, don't quibble, don't whine.
"If God has told you something is right, if something indeed is true for you, He will provide the way for you to accomplish it."
"When the light dawns and it finally comes to you that this gospel really is true and the work matters and that God is not going to come down and do it himself, we will realize that we are the only hands He has got, and that we are the only feet he has got. When somebody knocks on those doors, it is with our knuckles. When we make contact on the street, it is our voice out there on that street corner. When we work with the less active, Moroni and Mormon and Alma and Joseph Smith are not going to come down and go in that door and do that teaching; it is you and it is me, it is just people who get up, like we get up every morning and do the work of the Lord the way those men and their wives did it in their era and in their day and in their age, but now it is our time. When we come to know this, then we will get on with the work." -- Jeffery R. Holland
"Give everything you have to this service, and God will work wonders in your life." -- Elder Jeffery R. Holland
"Spiritually you will have to part the Red Sea every day of your mission." -- Elder Jeffery R. Holland
"Stroke when you don't want to stroke, kick when you don't want to kick." -- Elder Jeffery R. Holland
"At 19, 20, and 21 you can afford to be a little tired." -- Elder Jeffery R. Holland
"Don't you ever go home, don’t you dare leave this place for your sake. I'd rip the cords off the TV cameras to tie you up and keep you here. Don't ever give up, don't go home. If you are surprised about the difficulty of this work, welcome to the big time, welcome to the church, welcome to the lives of the Apostles, welcome to the life of Christ, who knows quite a bit about cups people don't want to drink, and paths people don't want to take." -- Elder Jeffery R. Holland
"You are not out [serving a mission] for yourself, you are not out for your family, you are not out for your ward - you are out defending and representing the best blood ever to live in this world, who did not have what we have. You are carrying legions upon your arms and shoulders. You are carrying the testimonies of missionaries who paid a fart greater price than you have been asked to pay." -- Jeffery R. Holland
"Brethren the spirit of the work is urgency, and we must imbue our missionaries and members with the Spirit now. N-O-W. We are not just waiting for natural slow growth. We must move more rapidly. We must take things up a notch. If we have to call down miracles or angels, then call them down. The drama is unfolding and we must do whatever it takes to ratchet up the work…I feel an incredible sense of urgency in my chest. I can hardly breathe. Every dispensation begins with a vision. We must have a vision. We are a church that dreams dreams. We are the church that has visions. We must believe in miracles. We must believe and build on what our forefathers have done. We are just going to putter along, be average, until now, wind up to the level when our heart is up in our throat and if we opened our eyes we would expect to see angels…If this is God's work and he still lives, then miracles and angels are still there. We must live up to our potential. God will bless us with whatever we need. God wants us to just see what He sees and know what He knows. He wants us to ratchet up the vision. God is easy to please and hard to satisfy…This is not convenient, easy work. We have got to take things to the edge. We have to move into the realm of miraculous. We have to live in such a way that we cannot do it alone anymore -- where we will resort to the Lord. Where we will cry, 'without they help I will fall, help me fly.' Go to the edge where miracles happen. Move into the realm of miraculous. Have full faith. Believe in angels. With the power of the priesthood, push the envelope. Welcome to the apostolic work." -- Jeffery R. Holland
"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Hovering at a Low Altitude
by Dahlia Ravikovitch
translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld
I am not here.
I am on those craggy eastern hills
streaked with ice
where grass doesn't grow
and a sweeping shadow overruns the slope.
A little shepherd girl
with a herd of goats,
black goats,
emerges suddenly
from an unseen tent.
She won't live out the day, that girl,
in the pasture.
I am not here.
Inside the gaping mouth of the mountain
a red globe flares,
not yet a sun.
A lesion of frost, flushed and sickly,
revolves in that maw.
And the little one rose so early
to go to the pasture.
She doesn't walk with neck outstretched
and wanton glances.
She doesn't paint her eyes with kohl.
She doesn't ask, Whence cometh my help.
I am not here.
I've been in the mountains many days now.
The light will not scorch me. The frost cannot touch me.
Nothing can amaze me now.
I've seen worse things in my life.
I tuck my dress tight around my legs and hover
very close to the ground.
What ever was she thinking, that girl?
Wild to look at, unwashed.
For a moment she crouches down.
Her cheeks soft silk,
frostbite on the back of her hand.
She seems distracted, but no,
in fact she's alert.
She still has a few hours left.
But that's hardly the object of my meditations.
My thoughts, soft as down, cushion me comfortably.
I've found a very simple method,
not so much as a foot-breadth on land
and not flying, either—
hovering at a low altitude.
But as day tends toward noon,
many hours
after sunrise,
that man makes his way up the mountain.
He looks innocent enough.
The girl is right there, near him,
not another soul around.
And if she runs for cover, or cries out—
there's no place to hide in the mountains.
I am not here.
I'm above those savage mountain ranges
in the farthest reaches of the East.
No need to elaborate.
With a single hurling thrust one can hover
and whirl about with the speed of the wind.
Can make a getaway and persuade myself:
I haven't seen a thing.
And the little one, her eyes start from their sockets,
her palate is dry as a potsherd,
when a hard hand grasps her hair, gripping her
without a shred of pity.
How Many Nights by Galway Kinnell
How many nights
have I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit, maker of night and day,
only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world,
hearing under the creaking snow
faint, peaceful breaths...
snake,
bear, earthworm, ant...
and above me
a wild crow crying 'yaw, yaw, yaw'
from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life.
"If you want to change, make a covenant and then keep it." -- Robert Swenson
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.
Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.
To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.
Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.
Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.
Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.
When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.
D&C 8
"…you shall receive a knowledge of whatsoever you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that ye shall receive."
"…I will tell you in your heart and in your mind, by the Holy Ghost.
"This is the spirit of revelation.
"Doubt not, for it is the gift of God.
"Remember that without faith you can do nothing. Therefore ask in faith. Trifle not with these things; do not ask for that which you ought not."
"Think of writing then not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message. Writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn't have started out thinking. Writing is, in fact, a transaction with words whereby you free yourself from what you presently think, feel, and perceive. You make available to yourself something better than what you'd be stuck with if you'd actually succeeded in making your meaning clear at the start." 15
"The lesson, then, is to try to treat writing not exclusively as linear but as wholistic: not starting in at one end and writing till you get to the other; but rather as successive sketches of the same picture -- the first sketches very rough and vague -- each one getting clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and better organized as well." 29
"One of the functions of a diary is to create interaction between you and symbols on paper. If you have strong feelings and then write them down freely, it gives you on the one hand some distance and control, but on the other hand it often makes you feel those feelings more. For you can often allow yourself to feel something more if you are not so helpless and lost in the middle of it. So the writing helps you feel the feeling and then go on to feel the next feelings. Not be stuck." 56
"All parts of a piece of writing are interdependent. No part is done till all parts are done. If you think there are four sections in what you have to write, the worst thing you can do is write them separately so you finish one before going on the next. This prevents interaction, cooking, growing. Make yourself sketch in all four parts quickly and lightly; then work some more on each part, letting it go where it needs to; continue improving all the parts; and only finish one part when you are also ready to finish the others." 72
About ten minute free writes: "They make it easier for you to deal with whatever static in your head is tying your tongue. " 74
"Talk to yourself in your writing. If you stop involuntarily in the middle of a sentence when you suddenly see it's turning out stupid of wrong, force yourself to keep writing and write to yourself whatever it is you have to say about that sentence: why it is stupid of wrong, whatever. This activity helps more than any other to keep me from bogging down. It frees my voice and my writing. It breaks down the barrier that says I keep my real words to myself and only write "prepared " words for my audience." 74
<html>To borrow a few lines from the estimable Eve Harrington (of <em>All About Eve</em> fame): "What is there for me to say? Everything wise and witty has long since been said—by minds more mature and talents far greater than mine." Nevertheless, I feel the need to weigh in.</html>
Source: [[From Rus with Love - Los Angeles Times Magazine|http://fromruswithlove.latimesmagazine.com/page/2/]]
"Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as a bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own." -- Leo Buscaglia
"If my life is of no value to my friends, it is of none to myself." -- Joseph Smith
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
I will own a sailboat sleek
as fingers of wind
and ply the green islands
of the gulf of Maine.
In my next life I will pilot a plane,
and enjoy the light artillery
of the air as I fly to our island
and set down with aplomb
on its grass runway.
I'll be a whiz at math, master five or six
of the world's languages, write poems
strong as Frost and Milosz.
In my next life I won't wonder why
I lie awake from four till daybreak.
I'll be amiable, mostly, but large
and formidable.
I'll insist you be present
in my next life -- and the one after that.
In the Month of May
In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.
I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?
And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.
"The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri, from The Long Meadow. (c) Graywolf Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
And
"In the Month of May" by Robert Bly, from Selected Poems. (c) Harper Perennial, 1986. Reprinted with permission.
I open my eyes to see how the night
is progressing. The clock glows green,
the light of the last-quarter moon
shines up off the snow into our bedroom.
Her portion of our oceanic duvet
lies completely flat. The words
of the shepherd in Tristan, "Waste
and empty, the sea," come back to me.
Where can she be? Then in the furrow
where the duvet overlaps her pillow,
a small hank of brown hair
shows itself, her marker that she's here,
asleep, somewhere down in the dark
underneath. Now she rotates
herself a quarter turn, from strewn
all unfolded on her back to bunched
in a Z on her side, with her back to me.
I squirm nearer, careful not to break
into the immensity of her sleep,
and lie there absorbing the astounding
quantity of heat a slender body
ovens up around itself.
Her slow, purring, sometimes snorish,
perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds
abruptly stop. A leg darts back
and hooks my ankle with its foot
and draws me closer. Immediately
her sleeping sounds resume, telling me:
"Come, press against me, yes, like that,
put your right elbow on my hipbone, perfect,
and your right hand at my breasts, yes, that's it,
now your left arm, which has become extra,
stow it somewhere out of the way, good.
Entangled with each other so, unsleeping one,
together we will outsleep the night."
Q: You've said that the difference between style and fasion is quality. How does that relate to your designs for the home?
A: "Fashion is often about trends, whereas style is about more eternal qualities. The essence of goode design for me lies in the consistency of approach. I believe that a designer should have a point of view and be passionate about pursuing and developing it. As a designer, I believe that there is nothing to be gained by following transient trends, as this can lead you in all sorts of different directions and you can easily lose your own distinctive voice. Good design should aim to produce things that are both beautiful and fucntional."
As Iococca once said, "We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."
[[Is China Heading for a Bubble Bursting Downturn? : China Briefing News|http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2009/10/22/is-china-heading-for-a-bubble-bursting-downturn.html]]
<html><div class="hilite"><div class="verse"><div id="isa/30/20" onclick="return toggleMarked(event, this)"> 20
And <i>though</i> the Lord give you the bread of <sup>a</sup><a href="isa/30/20a" mark="a" type="B" title="TG Adversity.">adversity</a>, and the water of affliction, yet shall not <sup>b</sup><a href="isa/30/20b" mark="b" type="P" title="HEB thy teacher; i.e. the LORD.">thy</a> teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy <sup>c</sup><a href="isa/30/20c" mark="c" type="B" title="TG Teachers.">teachers</a>:
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="hilite">
<div class="verse"><a name="21"></a>
<div id="isa/30/21" onclick="return toggleMarked(event, this)">
21
And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This <i>is</i> the way, <sup>a</sup><a href="isa/30/21a" mark="a" type="B" title="TG Walking with God.">walk</a> ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.
</div></div></div></html>
Source: [[Isaiah 30|http://scriptures.lds.org/isa/30/20-21#20]]
<html>The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were</html>
Source: [[Op-Ed Columnist - It Still Felt Good the Morning After - NYTimes.com|http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09rich.html?ref=opinion]]
<html><p>Compared to the already rich and famous, no-names can be less egotistic and often more insightful. Plus the value flows bi-directionally (you can help each other).</p>
<p>How to find a hidden gem? Hints from <a href="http://ben.casnocha.com/2008/07/to-find-good-pe.html">my post on de-emphasizing popular filters</a>: seek out introverts. Seek out people under age 30. Seek out people who are bad at marketing.
</p><p>Recognize and discount the celebrity effect. Spend time with people who also have time to spend with you. My bet is you'll have a more rewarding relationship.
</p></html>
Source: [[Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Networking: It's Too Late to Get to Know a Fortune 500 CEO|http://ben.casnocha.com/2008/09/networking-its.html]]
What is there not to love about JFK? A handsome, rich man that gets all the ladies, plays around most of his life, becomes President of the United States, and dies in a manner such that the entire world remembers him.
The Oliver Stone movie that bears his name is one of my all-time favorite movies. I have read all the major biographies of his life. I admit, I admire him.
However, he reminds me somewhat of the "self-made man" whose father paid for his college and graduate school, helped with his first mortgage, and landed him his first job. In other words, a man who has rarely failed because of the people backing him up.
Within that context, I love quotes like these:
"Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly."
Of course you dare to fail miserably--what does it matter?
"It pains me, as a bringer of dharma and light, to feel driven to imaginary acts of symbolic violence, but even a man of peace can take only so much until frustration blazes to the upper floor."
Source: [[James Wolcott on What's Wrong with Washington : vanityfair.com|http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/05/james-wolcott200905]]
“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”
— John Steinbeck
"...Yale literary critic Harold Bloom comment[ed] that Smith was an 'authentic religious genius' who 'surpassed all Americans, before or since, in the possession and expression of what could be called the religion-making imagination.'"
The Joseph Smith Papers, p xvii
"Mr. Sharp, Editor of the Warsaw Signal:
Sir - You will discontinue my paper - its contents are calculated to pollute me, and to patronize the filthy sheet - that tissue of lies - that sink of iniquity - is disgraceful to any mortal man. Yours with utter contempt,
Joseph Smith
P.S. Please publish the above in your contemptible paper."
The Joseph Smith Papers, p xxix
"Joseph Smith's overflowing affection for his people was one reason for their loyalty. 'Friendship,' he told his people, 'is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism, to revolutionize and civilize the world, pour forth love.'"
Joseph Smith Papers, p xxx
<html>The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.</html>
Source: [[Juma Ikangaa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juma_Ikangaa]]
"In your efforts to be just, don't forget to be kind." -- Harold B. Lee's wife
'Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.
–“Investigations of a Dog”
“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”
–The Trial
“. . . accused men are always the most attractive.”
–The Trial
It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not.
–July 9, 1912
To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.
–December 4, 1913
In peacetime you don’t get anywhere, in wartime you bleed to death.
–September 19, 1917
It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off.
–October 18, 1921
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
–#62
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.
We were expelled from Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed. In a sense our expulsion from Paradise was a stroke of luck, for had we not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.
Religions get lost as people do.
I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.
–To Max Brod
Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one’s ability to do so.
–To Felice Bauer, December 4, 1912
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
–To Ottla (sister)
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
– “Humanity”
In Kafka we have the modern mind, seemingly self-sufficient, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate real one – yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God.
–Erich Heller, Franz Kafka
Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
83, a slight variant of this was later published in Parables and Paradoxes (1946):
We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we find ourselves is sinful, quite independent of guilt.
"It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted.” “You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all.” “It is precisely in this ‘Cannot, after all’ that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form.”
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but at the very last.
Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
(18 October 1921)
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
"Description of a Struggle"
<html>When asked by one of them how he became so successful as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, his reply was simple: "I'm not embarrassed to fail."</html>
Source: [[Khosla on high-impact VC investments (Dealscape - Featured)|http://www.thedeal.com/dealscape/2009/09/khosla_on_high_impact_vc_inves.php]]
Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
<html><p>He was what he was, wherever he was.</p>
<a name="30"></a>
<p>That is the mark of every person who is bold and effective in sharing the gospel. They see themselves as children of a loving, living Father in Heaven. And they see themselves as disciples of Jesus Christ. It takes no discipline for them to pray. They do it naturally. It is no special effort to remember the Savior. His love for them and theirs for Him is always with them. That is who they are and how they see themselves and see those around them.</p></html>
Source: [[LDS.org - Ensign Article - A Child and a Disciple|file:///Users/Kaahl/Church/Gospel%20Study/Henry%20B%20Eyring/A%20Child%20and%20a%20Disciple.html]]
<html>As we discussed the struggle to forgive one day, he said, “Well, keep a place in your heart for forgiveness, and when it comes, welcome it in.”</html>
Source: [[LDS.org - Ensign Article - My Journey to Forgiving|http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=7dc2dbdcc370c010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD]]
<html>“Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned.” (<em>Light on C. S. Lewis, </em>Harcourt and Brace: New York, 1965, p. 26.)</html>
Source: [[LDS.org - New Era Article - The Stern but Sweet Seventh Commandment|http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=024644f8f206c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=1508ba9ff599b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1]]
"The gods sell us all good things at the price of our labor." -- Socrates
<html><h2><a href="index.html">Philip Larkin</a> - This Be The Verse</h2>
<pre>They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
</pre></html>
Source: [[Larkin - This Be The Verse|http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm]]
<html>Irate gentleman: "Are you in charge here?"<br>The Doctor: "No, but I have a lot of ideas."</html>
"Do you believe what you have been teaching others? Are you sure and certain that God lives? Do you believe in the Atonement of the Lord and Master? Sometimes when we stand in the stark nakedness all alone, it's then that our testimony has to grow deep if we are not going to be shattered and fall by the wayside." -- Harold B. Lee
1. Empathize with your enemy.
2. Rationality will not save us.
3. There's something beyond one's self.
4. Maximize efficiency.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6. Get the data.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10. Never say never.
11. You can't change human nature.
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War>
"Our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. [That is because] there is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan." - C.S. Lewis
"The Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish justice and substitute mercy for it…mercy detached from the justice grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish in the mountain soil, so it appears that mercy will only flower when it grows in the crannies of the rock of justice: transplanted to the mere marshlands of humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety." -- C.S. Lewis
<html> In the McCaffery interview, he described “Broom” as covert autobiography, “the sensitive tale of a sensitive young <span class="smallcaps">WASP</span> who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction . . . which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.”</html>
<html>“My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.”</html>
Source: [[Life and Letters: The Unfinished: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker|http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all]]
"Look to the lighthouse of the Lord. There is no fog so dense, no night so dark, no gale so strong, no mariner so lost but what its beacon light can rescue. It calls, 'This way to safety, this way to home.'" -- Neal A. Maxwell
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very
quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can
occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a
wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
"To have lost one parent, Mr. Worthing, might be considered a misfortune. To have lost both smacks of carelessness." -- The Importance of Being Earnest
"Love, let us agree, may be a fault." p 129
Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
by Rita Dove
Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
The Heiligenstadt Testament
Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness
I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.
At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.
I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.
Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible
to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.
I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.
<html>I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don’t wish to retire at this time.</html>
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
Source: [[Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence : 43 Folders|http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/05/bad-correspondent]]
<html>The scientific method & capitalism are similarly inhuman systems. They also happen to be the primary sources of our progress.</html>
Source: [[Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder|http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/11/sentences-to--1.html]]
Sometimes enduring may mean letting go when everything inside of us wants to hold on.
Jesus drank the bitterest cup without becoming bitter.
"We cannot learn any deep or lasting things about Jesus unless we take his yoke upon us. Then, though on our small scales compared to his, the relevant experiences will teach us keenly and deeply about him and his divine attributes." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"Some of life's hardest lessons require repetition." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"God's plan is not the plan of pleasure, it is the plan of happiness." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"How can we expect to overcome the world if we are insulated from its trials and challenges." -- Neal A. Maxwell
All virtues at the testing point take the form of courage.
Passivity or inarticulateness on our part about this marvelous work and a wonder can diminish the faith of others, can cause them to question the credibility of our commitment.
Though argument does not create belief, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced. But what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it nourishes a climate in which belief may flourish.
No one, brothers and sisters, would pay us much heed if we were merely nonsmoking, nondrinking humanists.
Pasted from <http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6170&x=24&y=10>
Our Father is a loving father who wants us to have the happiness that results not from mere innocence, but from proven righteousness. Therefore he will at times not deflect life's harsh learning experiences that may come to each of us, even though he may help us in coping with them.
Love leads us into the fray, not away from Nineveh.
<html><p><em>"I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky."</em></p>
<p><em> -- Abraham Lincoln</em></p></html>
Source: [[RealClearPolitics - Articles - McConnell a Man of the Senate|http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/11/mcconnell_a_man_of_the_senate.html]]
"However talented men may be in administrative matters; however eloquent they may be in expressing their views; however learned they may be in the worldly things - they will be denied the sweet whisperings of the Spirit that might have been theirs unless they pay the price of studying, pondering, and praying about the scriptures."
Robert McNamara: If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
Pasted from <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/quotes>
<html><h1 class="title"><font face="times, times new roman"><font size="+1">Hairstyles that Would Also Make Better Lovers than My Boyfriend, Bob.</font> </font></h1>
<p align="center"><font face="times, times new roman"><font size="-1">BY <!--<a href = "mailto:adamskalman@gmail.com">-->REBECCA HUVAL</font></font></p>
<p align="center"><font face="times, times new roman"><font size="-1">- - - -</font></font></p>
<p><font face="times, times new roman">Edgy Bob
</font></p><p><font face="times, times new roman">Chin-caressing Bob
</font></p><p><font face="times, times new roman">Updated Bob
</font></p><p><font face="times, times new roman">Graduated Bob
</font></p></html>
Source: [[McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Hairstyles that Would Also Make Better Lovers than My Boyfriend, Bob.|http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/8huval.html]]
<html>Remember the rules of electricity: positive attracts negative. So be negative to attract the positive. Also, negative repels negative. Double win!
</html>
Source: [[McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Seven Laws of Higher Self-Esteem.|http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/21WynnQuon.html]]
How much meat moves
Into the city each night
The decks of its bridges tremble
In the liquefaction of sodium light
And the moon a chemical orange
Semitrailers strain their axles
Shivering as they take the long curve
Over warehouses and lofts
The wilderness of streets below
The mesh of it
With Joe on the front stoop smoking
And Louise on the phone with her mother
Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city's shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night
"Get by yourself and think of things of the Lord, of things of the Spirit….Think of the things of God. Just meditate and reflect for an hour about yourself and your relationship to your Heavenly Father and your Redeemer. It will do something for you."
"There appears to be "no other way" to learn certain things except through the relevant, clinical experiences. Happily, the commandment "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart" (Matthew 11:29) carries an accompanying and compensating promise from Jesus -- "and ye shall find rest unto your souls." This is a very special form of rest. It surely includes the rest resulting from the shedding of certain needless burdens: fatiguing insincerity, exhausting hypocrisy, and the strength-sapping quest for recognition, praise, and power. Those of us who fall short, in one way or another, often do so because we carry such unnecessary and heavy baggage. Being thus overloaded, we sometimes stumble and then feel sorry for ourselves.
We need not carry such baggage. However, when we're not meek, we resist the informing voice of conscience and feedback from family, leaders, and friends. Whether from preoccupation or pride, the warning signals go unnoticed or unheeded. However, if sufficient meekness is in us, it will not only help to jettison unneeded burdens, but will also keep us from becoming mired in the ooze of self-pity. Furthermore, true meekness has a metabolism that actually requires very little praise or recognition -- of which there is usually such a shortage anyway. Most of the time, the sponge of selfishness quickly soaks up everything in sight, including praise intended for others.
Source[[here|http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=624]]
<html><dt class="quote"><a title="Click for further information about this quotation" href="/quote/3986.html">A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.</a> </dt><dd class="author"><div class="icons"><a title="Further information about this quotation" href="/quote/3986.html"><img src="/icon_info.gif" alt="[info]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Add to Your Quotations Page" href="/myquotations.php?add=3986"><img src="/icon_plus.gif" alt="[add]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><a title="Email this quotation" href="/quote/3986.html#email"><img src="/icon_email.gif" alt="[mail]" border="0" height="16" width="16"></a><img src="/icon_blank.gif" alt="" border="0" height="16" width="16"></div><b><a href="/quotes/Dean_Acheson/">Dean Acheson</a></b>, <i>in Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1977</i></dd></html>
Source: [[Quotation Search - Quote Search - The Quotations Page|http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=journal&page=3]]
"We cannot expect to live in a time when men's hearts fail them except the faithful experience a few fibrillations themselves." -- Neal A. Maxwell
Thus a people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.
Pasted from <http://www.4literature.net/John_Stuart_Mill/Representative_Government/2.html>
Mingus at the Showplace by William Matthews
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.
So I made him look at the poem.
"There's a lot of that going around," he said,
and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn't look as if he thought
bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
if they were baseball executives they'd plot
to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later
that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.
"We've suffered a diminuendo in personnel,"
he explained, and the band played on.
"Mingus at the Showplace" by William Matthews, from Time and Money: New Poems (c) Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Reprinted with permission.
"Yes, by all means, go for the bagel, and may its voyage through the digestive track be a propitious one."
-- ha
"...executing tighter and tighter spirals of self-referentiality as they pursue the tweet smell of success."
"Should doubt knock on your doorway, just say to those skeptical disturbing thoughts: 'I propose to stay with my faith, with the faith of my people. I know that happiness and contentment are there and I forbid you, agnostic, doubting thoughts to destroy my house of faith. I acknowledge that I do not understand the process of creation, but accept the fact of it. I grant that I cannot explain the miracles of the Bible, and I do not attempt to do so, but I accept God's word. I wasn't with Joseph Smith but I believe him. My faith did not come to me through science and I will not permit so-call science to destroy it." -- Thomas S. Monson
"There is a guiding hand above all things. Often when things happen, it's not by accident. One day, when we look back the seeming coincidence of our lives, we realize that perhaps they were so coincidental after all." -- Thomas S. Monson
"No one knew of the sinister background, and how could anyone have guessed it? There are marshes in India which behave in an extraordinary fashion, the waters becoming turbulent when there is no wind to stir them. The troubled surface is all one sees, not the hydra lurking beneath. Many men possess a secret monster, a despair that haunts their nights. They live ordinary lives, coming and going like other men. No one suspects the existence of a sharp-toothed parasite gnawing at their vitals which kills them in the end. The man is like a stagnant but deep pond, only an occasional unaccountable ripple troubles the surface. A bubble rises and burst, a small thing but terrible: it is the breathing of the monster in the depths." p 1166
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington>
Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixer of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle. (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 184)
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington>
"In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders." (Clash of Civilizations, original 1993 Foreign Affairs article)
Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington>
My father woke at five.
My own eyes often opened
before he touched my shoulder.
Mother's hands had learned
to fly, to place his plate -- eggs
cooked flat -- on the table
just as his footsteps
reached the bottom stair.
We drank water
ate fast and said little.
Cattle and hogs with needs
keen as our own
waited, eager but wary
even as we fed them.
We were killers with a handout.
They felt our hurry
and the hint of death in it.
Music by Anne Porter
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I've never understood
Why this is so
Bur there's an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
Omidyar was struck by Yunus’s statement that the poor are natural entrepreneurs, essentially because their business activities are a matter of survival. “By giving them the tools, you unleash the entrepreneurial instinct,”
Pasted from <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061030fa_fact1>
"He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."
"How to Write," Richard Rhodes, p. 5, quoted from Victor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"
"There are no bounds to human thought. At its own risk and peril it analyses and explores its own bewilderment. One may almost say that in a kind of transcendent reaction it bewilders nature; the mysterious world around us gives back what it is given, and probably the contemplators are themselves contemplated. However this may be, there are men - but are they men? - who clearly discern beyond the horizon of dreaming the heights of the Absolute, who experience the terrible vision of the infinite mountain." p 68-69
<html>But it isn't only issues of war and peace that set off America's braying critics.</html>
like braying in this context
Source: [[Obama lovefest won't last - The Boston Globe|http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/11/09/obama_lovefest_wont_last/]]
<html>"You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now."</html>
Source: [[Obama must honor promises : Viewpoints, Outlook : Chron.com - Houston Chronicle|http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6101549.html]]
The tender-
hearted artichoke
dressed in its armor
built its modest cupola
and stood
erect,
impenetrable
beneath
a lamina of leaves.
Around it,
maddened vegetables,
ruffling their leaves,
contrived
creepers, cattails,
bulbs, and tubers to astound;
beneath the ground
slept
the red-whiskered carrot;
above, the grapevine
dried its runners,
bearers of the wine;
the cabbage
preened itself,
arranging its flounces;
oregano
perfumed the world,
while the gentle
artichoke
stood proudly in the garden,
clad in armor
burnished
to a pomegranate
glow.
And then one day,
with all the other artichokes
in willow baskets,
our artichoke
set out to market
to realize its dream:
life as a soldier.
Amid the ranks
never was it so martial
as in the fair,
white-shirted
men
among the greens
marshaled
the field
of artichokes;
close formations,
shouted commands,
and the detonation
of a falling crate.
But
look,
here comes
Maria
with her shopping basket.
Unintimidated,
she selects
our artichoke,
examines it, holds it to
the light as if it were an egg;
she buys it,
she drops it
in a shopping bag
that holds a pair of shoes,
a cabbage head, and one
bottle
of vinegar.
Once home
and in the kitchen
she drowns it in a pot.
And thus ends
in peace
the saga
of the armored vegetable
we call the artichoke,
as
leaf by leaf
we unsheath
its delights
and eat
the peaceable flesh
of its green heart.
<html>I like men who have a future and women who have a past.<br>
-Oscar Wilde</html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital » Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 08-23-2009 - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06|http://longorshortcapital.com/quotes-entirely-relevant-to-investing-08-23-2009-wilde.htm]]
On Turning Ten
Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
"The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."
— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines
"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
— Dorothy Parker
Pasted from <http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2007/12/true-story.html>
"When you choose to follow Christ you leave neutral ground forever." -- Joseph Smith
"The way to gain wisdom is not from books, but go to the Lord in prayer." -- Joseph Smith
"Never get discouraged. If I were in the deepest coal pit in Nova Scotia and had the Rocky Mountains piled on top of me, I would not get discouraged, and I would come out on top." -- Joseph Smith
"You do not have power to overcome the adversary and his hosts except through the power of Christ, and you do not have such power save you are humble." -- Joseph Smith
"Any man who has a bow and has it constantly strung tight will soon lose the spring in his bow." -- Joseph Smith
"Faith is the principle of action and of power in all intelligent beings, both in heaven and on earth." -- Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith
"We understand that when a man works by faith he works by mental exertion instead of physical force." -- Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith
"Before you joined this church you stood on neutral ground. When the gospel was preached good and evil were set before you. You could choose either or neither. There were two opposite masters inviting you to serve them. When you joined this church, you enlisted to serve god. When you did that you left the neutral ground and you can never go back onto it. Should you forsake the Master you enlisted to serve it will be by the instigation of the evil one, and you will follow his dictation and be his servant. -- Joseph Smith
Judges
"Alas master, how shall we do it?"
"Fear not, they that be with us are more than they that be with them."
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Tertuliano Maximo Afonso started the engine, and then, with a weary gesture, set the car in motion and drove home, where, patient and confident of its power, loneliness was waiting for him. P 170
"One of the perplexities of Mormonism is why a religion formed in America was so constantly in conflict with the society around it. Why could no American community tolerate the Latter-day Saints' presence for more than a few years?"
...
"There was always the question of which took precedence, the voice of the people acting through democratic government or the voice of God speaking through his prophet. Roman Catholics, with their belief in the pope's infallibility, were entangled in the same conflict. Smith assured the world he had no intention of breaking the law, and a revelation admonished his followers to submit to legal proceedings. But the potential for conflict was always there, and in the case of plural marriage, Smith did put his revelation first."
The Joseph Smith Papers, p xxvi
"I believe in the midst of all these tribulations God will send fire from heaven, if necessary, to destroy our enemies while we carry forward our work and push that stone until it fills the whole earth. Your destiny is to do that very thing, and this is the kind of protection you will have. You do not need to fear about world conditions. You do not need to fear about anybody. Just serve the Lord and keep his commandments and build the Kingdom, and as you do so you will be protected in these the last days." -- Mark E. Petersen
"The definition of a fool: someone who does what he has always done and expects a different result."
The greatest loss of power that there is, is the loss that results from the failure of individuals to reach their potential. There are many reasons for this. But if we reduce them to a few common denominators, we can say that some of the more important ones are failure to do adequate realistic planning; lack of desire, commitment, and dedication; failure to use time effectively; and failure to correct one’s mistakes.
Pasted from <http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dll/Magazines/Ensign/1974.htm/ensign%20may%201974.htm/inertia%20.htm>
Mosiah 14:11-12
"He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied….because he hath poured out his soul unto death."
"I was not put into this world to preserve my life but to protect souls." p 41
D&C 11
"Seek not for riches but for wisdom; and the mysteries of god shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall ye be made rich. Behold he that hath eternal life is rich.
"Even as you desire of me so it shall be done unto you; and, if you desire, you shall be the means of doing much good in this generation.
"Though has a gift…, or thou shalt have a gift I though wilt desire of me in faith, with an honest heart, believing in the power of Jesus Christ.
"According to your desires, according to your faith shall it be done unto you.
"Keep my commandments, hold your peace, and appeal unto my spirit.
"Cleave unto me with all your heart.
"This isyour work, to keep my commandments with all your might, mind, and strength."
Quarantine by Eavan Boland
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
.
Rain
Jack Gilbert
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.
I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain
We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. P 82
D&C 18:1-3
"Now behold, because of the thing which you…have desired to know of me, I give unto you these words.
"…I have manifested unto you, by my Spirit in many instances, that the things which you have written are true; wherefore you know that they are true.
"If you know they are true, behold I give unto you a commandment, that you rely upon the things that are written."
[Bishop speaking to Jean Valjean] "Yes. You have come from an unhappy place. But listen. There is more rejoicing in Heaven over the tears of one sinner who repents than over the white robes of a hundred who are virtuous. If you leave your place of suffering with hatred in your heart, and anger against men, you will be deserving of our pity; but if you leave with goodwill, in gentleness and peace, you will have risen above any of us." p 87
I.
Let's contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep:
All be as before, Love,
-- Only sleep!
II.
What so wild as words are?
I and thou
In debate, as birds are,
Hawk on bough!
III.
See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!
IV.
What so false as truth is,
False to thee?
Where the serpent's tooth is
Shun the tree--
V.
Where the apple reddens
Never pry--
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.
VI.
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
VII.
Teach me, only teach, Love
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought--
VIII.
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.
IX.
That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:
X
-- Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee.
"The efficacy of our prayers depends upon our liberality to the poor." -- Marion G. Romney
"There are those among us who try to serve the Lord without offending the devil." -- Marion G. Romney
"Now you are going to live out your lives in contemporary society. It is a society in which, instead of a rush to judgment, there is almost a rush to mercy, because people are so anxious to be nonjudgmental. Many have quite a confused understanding of mercy and justice. People tend to shy away from correction, even when it might be helpful." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"'Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers.' 'You are wrong,' replied the bishop. 'The beautiful is as useful as the useful.' Then, after a pause, he added: 'More so, perhaps.'" p 38
D&C 88:67-68
"Therefore sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you will see him; for he will reveal his face unto you."
[Jean Val Jean thinking of the family he lost because of his time in prison.] "What becomes of the leaves of a tree, sawed down at the root?" p 94
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
"In order to accomplish goals that have never been reached, we must do things that have never been done."
"Be grateful that your righteous life molds you so that you don't fit where you don't belong." -- Richard G. Scott
I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.
Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.
Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch
though I'm not twenty
and won't be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.
"Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself." -- George Bernard Shaw
I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she'd worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything--
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief--
until sleep captured her and bore her down.
She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.
When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.
"In my early 30s I faced personal disappointment that broke my heart. From a point of view distorted by emotional pain, I couldn't believe that anything or anyone could take away the loneliness or that I would ever feel whole or happy again.
"I pleaded with God to change my circumstances because I believed I could never be happy until He did. Instead, He changed my heart. I asked Him to take away my burden, but He strengthened me so I could bear my burden with ease.
"George Q Cannon taught: 'When we went forth into the waters of baptism and covenanted with our Father in Heaven to serve Him and keep his commandments, He bound Himself also by covenant to us that He would never desert us, never leave us to ourselves, never forget us, that in the midst of trials and hardships, when everything was arrayed against us, He would be near unto us and would sustain us.'
"Do you believe that the Savior will really do for you what He has said He will do? That He can ease the sting of loneliness and enable you to deal with that haunting sense of inadequacy?...That He will help you resist your greatest temptation and tame your most annoying weakness? That He will respond to your deepest longing? That He is the only source of comfort, strength, direction, and peace that will not change, will not betray you, and will never let you down?"
<<search>><<closeAll>><<permaview>><<newTiddler>><<newJournal "DD MMM YYYY" "journal">><<saveChanges>><<slider chkSliderOptionsPanel OptionsPanel "options »" "Change TiddlyWiki advanced options">>
<html>dictum from John Allen Paulos: "Always be smart; seldom be certain."</html>
Source: [[When Can You Trust Economics Papers? - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com|http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/11/06/when-can-you-trust-economics-papers]]
"Personally, I have no enemies. My enemies are not mine, they are His whom I am trying to serve. The devil doesn't care much about me. I am insignificant, but he hates the Priesthood, which is after the order of the Son of God." -- Joseph F. Smith
"We ought to say in our hearts, let God judge between me and thee, but as for me, I will forgive" -- Joseph F. Smith
Yes it would be good to see each other, as if she were his beloved, and we know that she is not, or perhaps she is and he doesn't know it, or perhaps, he stopped at this word because he didn't know how to complete the sentence honestly, what lie or what pretend truth he would say to himself, it's true that his eyes had grown misty with emotion, she wanted to see him, yes, sometimes its good to have someone who wants to see us and who tells us so, but the treacherous tear, already wiped away with the back of his hand, appeared only because he was alone and because his solitude suddenly weighed on him more than in his darkest hours. P 200
"So many of us are waiting to be happy. For too many, happiness is just over the horizon, never reachable." -- Joseph B. Wirthlin
"Most people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Don't take yourself too seriously." -- J. Reuben Clark
"Happiness does not depend on what happens outside you, but on what happens inside you. It is measured by the spirit with which you meet the problems of life." -- Harold B. Lee
"And now if christ had not come into the world, speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could have been no redemption."
"He had settled the problem of his life in this fashion: to do as little material work as possible in order to work the more at immaterial things: in a word, to devote a few hours to practical affairs and squander the rest on the infinite." p 591
"If you look at your unedited free association closely -- look up the definitions and histories of key words, think through the sense of the sentences -- you'll probably find that it doesn't always say what you thought you were saying when you wrote it. The brain plays tricks. Language is redundant partly to communicate despite those tricks. I interviewed a mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam once, one of the coinventors of the hydrogen bomb. He had recently returned from a conference on memory. He had decided, he told me, that memory was like a hound dog. You send it sniffing off to find something, and sooner or later it comes back with its quarry."
What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on,
just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm falling
toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes.
No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the President's
a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're
cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless.
I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers.
I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears,
my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind.
But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane,
or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say,
"I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen.
Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside
I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, pulsing,
each star so close to the next and yet so far away.
Oh, the stars. In lines and curves, with fainter, more mysterious
designs beyond, and again, beyond. The longer I look, the more I see,
and the more I see, the deeper the universe grows.
I have a long way to go, and I'm starting now --
out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside.
"Thus he strove in torment as another man had striven eighteen hundred years before him, the mysterious Being in whom were embodied all the saintliness and suffering of mankind. He too while the olive-leaves quivered around him, had again and again refused the terrible cup of darkness urged upon him beneath a sky filled with stars." p 221
“The words ‘study it out’ mean a degree of patience, of labor, of persistence, commensurate with the value of what you seek…(alma scripture, teach them never to weary of good works, but to be meek and lowly of heart, for such shall find rest to their souls.’ The good works that really matter require the help of heaven and the help of heaven requires working past the point of fatigue so far that only the meek and lowly will keep going long enough.”
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<html>Success seems to be connected to action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.<br>
-Conrad Hilton</html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital » Quotes - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06|http://longorshortcapital.com/research/quotes]]
<html><p><strong>Duke Senior:</strong><br>
Sweet are the uses of adversity,<br>
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,<br>
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;<br>
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,<br>
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,<br>
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.<br>
</p>
<cite><a href="/ayli-text/act-ii-scene-1#sweetare">As You Like It Act 2, scene 1, 12–17</a></cite></html>
Source: [[Sweet are the uses of adversity - Shakespeare Quotes|http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/sweet-uses-adversity]]
Full Book: [[As You Like It|http://books.google.com/books?id=VhMlAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA128&dq=%22Sweet+are+the+uses+of+adversity,&ei=p0nOSvvLCpLykwS8kszmBQ#v=onepage&q=%22Sweet%20are%20the%20uses%20of%20adversity%2C&f=false]]
We shall not cease from exploring,
and the end of our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
<html>All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.<br>
-T.E. Lawrence</html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital » Quotes - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06|http://longorshortcapital.com/research/quotes/page/2]]
"I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung." -- Tagore
[[The China BRIC: Questions Ahead for Global Manufacturing’s Bride : 2point6billion.com - Foreign Direct Investment in Asia|http://www.2point6billion.com/news/2009/09/30/the-china-bric-questions-ahead-for-global-manufacturings-bride-2426.html]]
<html>As Abraham Lincoln said during America’s darkest hour, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”</html>
Source: [[Op-Ed Contributor - The Climate for Change - NYTimes.com|http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09gore.html?ref=opinion]]
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?”
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.
Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game.
Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own—artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts.
This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists.
The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19351
<html>Humility permeated traditional liberal arts education: the acceptance that we know very little; that as frail human beings, we live in an unforgiving natural world; and that culture can and should improve on nature without destroying it.</html>
Source: [[The Humanities Move Off Campus by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Autumn 2008|http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_classical_education.html]]
"The important thing is this: To be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become."
~ Charles Dubois
<html><p>I guess what I've come to you today to say is that God uses broken things--and I quote:
</p><p>
<i>It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. . . . it is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.</i> ["Broken Things," an excerpt from Vance Havner, <i>The Still Water </i>(Old Tappan, NJ: Flemming H. Revell, 1934). Quoted in <i>Guideposts</i>, October 1981, p. 5]
</p></html>
Source: [[The Inconvenient Messiah - Jeffrey R. Holland|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6831&x=73&y=6]]
<html>And we have purposes the Durants never dreamed of, "promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep" (Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening")</html>
Source: [[The Inconvenient Messiah - Jeffrey R. Holland|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6831&x=73&y=6]]
<html>It is ordained that we come to know our worth as children of God <i>without</i> something as dramatic as a leap from the pinnacle of the temple. All but a prophetic few must go about God's work in very quiet, very unspectacular ways. And as you labor to know him, and to know that he knows you; as you invest your time--and your convenience--in quiet, unassuming service, you will indeed find that "he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up" (Matthew 4:6). It may not come quickly. It probably won't come quickly, but there is purpose in the time it takes. Cherish your spiritual burdens because God will converse with you through them and will use you to do his work if you carry them well.</html>
Source: [[The Inconvenient Messiah - Jeffrey R. Holland|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6831&x=73&y=6]]
<html><p>Speaking to this issue several years ago Professor Hugh Nibley wrote:
</p><p>
<i>Why should we labor this unpleasant point? Because the Book of Mormon labors it, for our special benefit. Wealth is a jealous master who will not be served halfheartedly and will suffer no rival--not even God: "Ye </i>cannot<i> serve God and Mammon." (Matthew 6:24) In return for unquestioning obedience wealth promises security, power, position, and honors, in fact anything in this world. Above all, the Nephites like the Romans saw in it a mark of superiority and would do anything to get hold of it, for to them "money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes 10:19) "Ye do always remember your riches," cried Samuel the Lamanite, ". . .unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities." (Helaman 13:22) Along with this, of course, everyone dresses in the height of fashion, the main point being always that the proper clothes are expensive--the expression "costly apparel" occurs 14 times in the Book of Mormon. The more important wealth is, the less important it is how one gets it. </i>[<i>Since Cumorah</i> (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), pp. 393–94]
</p></html>
Source: [[The Inconvenient Messiah - Jeffrey R. Holland|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6831&x=73&y=6]]
<html>We often, like this man and Hamlet, must "take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them" (Act 3, scene 1, ll. 59–60)</html>
Source: [[The Inconvenient Messiah - Jeffrey R. Holland|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6831&x=73&y=6]]
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,
and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,
trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.
It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving
in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,
paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.
The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban.
Pasted from <http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-7.html?tw=wn_story_page_next7>
Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.
Pasted from <http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-3.html?tw=wn_story_page_next3>
Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary.
Pasted from <http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-7.html?tw=wn_story_page_next7>
<html> The ability to <strong>pay</strong> attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders. As the zen phrase says, “eat when you eat” meaning, give each thing you do all of your attention.</html>
Source: [[The Real Time Web is a Beautiful Distraction – Opposable Planets|http://www.opposableplanets.com/uncategorized/2009/05/the-real-time-web-is-a-beautiful-distraction/]]
<html><span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Breakups know no borders.</span> Lovers from different countries connect, conceive, and in some cases, combust. </html>
Source: [[The Atlantic Online : November 2009 : The Snatchback : Nadya Labi|http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/labi-snatchback]]
"The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness." p 30
"'The soul of an unfortunate who thanks God for consolation,' he said, 'is the best of altars.'" p 36
"Such free time as these occupations (as well as the daily officies and his breviary), allowed him, M. Myriel devoted to the needy and afflicted; and in the remaining time he worked. That is to say, he dug his garden or read and wrote, and for him both kinds of work bore the same name; both he called gardening. 'The spirit is a garden,' he said." p 33
In autumn,
facing the end of his life,
he moved in with me.
We piled his belongings--
his army-issue boots, knife magazines,
Steely Dan tapes, his grinder, drill press,
sanders, belts and hacksaws--
in a heap all over the living room floor.
For two weeks he walked around the mess.
One night he stood looking down at it all
and said: "The sum total of my existence."
Emptiness in his voice.
Soon after, as if the sum total
needed to be expanded, he began to place
things around in the closets and spaces I'd
cleared for him, and when he'd finished
setting up his workshop in the cellar, he said,
"I should make as many knives as I can,"
and he began to work.
The months plowed on through a cold winter.
In the evenings, we'd share supper, some tale
of family, some laughs, perhaps a walk in the snow.
Then he'd nip back down into the cellar's keep
To saw and grind and polish,
creating his beautiful knives
until he grew too weak to work.
But still he'd slip down to stand at his workbench
and touch his woods
and run his hand over his lathe.
One night he came up from the cellar
and stood in the kitchen's warmth
and, shifting his weight
from one foot to the other, said,
"I love my workshop."
Then he went up to bed.
He's gone now.
It's spring. It's been raining for weeks.
I go down to his shop and stand in the dust
of ground steel and shavings of wood.
I think on how he'd speak of his dying, so
easily, offhandedly, as if it were
a coming anniversary or
an appointment with the moon.
I touch his leather apron, folded for all time,
and his glasses set upon his work gloves.
I take up an unfinished knife and test its heft,
and feel as well the heft of my grief for
this man, this brother I loved,
the whole of him so much greater
than the sum of his existence.
<html>"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever" (<a href="/wiki/Ecclesiastes" title="Ecclesiastes">Ecclesiastes</a> 1:4).</html>
Source: [[The Sun Also Rises - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises]]
<html> <a href="/wiki/Ecclesiastes" title="Ecclesiastes">Ecclesiastes</a> <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_%28King_James%29/Ecclesiastes#1" class="extiw" title="wikisource:Bible (King James)/Ecclesiastes">1:5</a>: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."</html>
Source: [[The Sun Also Rises - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises]]
"The truth of an upright man must be accepted on his own terms. Moreover, since natures vary, we must agree that all the beauties of human excellence may be fostered by faiths that we do not share." p 65
[[The debate about Chinese asset prices: A bubble in Beijing? : The Economist|http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14587027]]
<html>Legendary newspaper columnist James Reston laid down the law more than a half -century ago: “The decisive battleground of American politics lies in the center and cannot be captured from either of the extremes, and any party that defies this principle does not improve its chances of national power or even effective opposition but precisely the opposite.”</html>
Source: [[The path out of the wilderness - John P. Avlon - Politico.com|http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15453.html]]
<html>As an executive at a large domestic oil refiner (who asked that his name and company not be disclosed) explained it, "ethanol is making diesel more expensive relative to gasoline because it's expanding the pool of gasoline. But to make diesel, we have to process more crude, which in turn is raising the price of crude." He went on, saying that for some refiners, "gasoline is being thrown into the market as a diesel byproduct."</html>
Source: [[The real reason ethanol won't—and can't—cut American oil imports. - By Robert Bryce - Slate Magazine|http://www.slate.com/id/2202314/pagenum/2]]
<html>Here a close study of the rhetoric and the actual policies of his predecessors Wilson, FDR and JFK will come in very handy indeed. For, as historians will tell you, none of those great "internationalist" statesmen did anything other than pursue America's "national" interests. What they had in common was the wisdom to see how they could merge what was good for their country with what was good for the world, or at least large parts of it.</html>
Source: [[The return of soft power? - International Herald Tribune|http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/13/opinion/edkennedy.php?page=2]]
Thoughts on Conjugal Love
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Riverside
Riverside CA 92521
June 4, 2003
Two friends recently asked me to contribute something to their wedding ceremony.
Since I’m a philosophy professor, I thought I would take the occasion to reflect a bit on the nature of conjugal love, the distinctive kind of love between a husband and wife.
The common view that love is a feeling is, I think, quite misguided.
Feelings come and go, while love is steady.
Feelings are “passions” in the classic sense of ‘passion’ which shares a root with ‘passive’.
They strike us largely unbidden.
Love, in contrast, is something actively built.
The passions suffered by teenagers and writers of romantic lyrics, felt so painfully, and often so temporarily, are not love – though in some cases they may be a prelude to it.
Rather than a feeling, love is a way of structuring one’s values, goals, and reactions.
One characteristic of it is a deep commitment to the good of the other for his or her own sake.
(This characterization of love owes quite a bit to Harry Frankfurt.)
We all care about the good of other people we meet and know, for their own sake and not just for utilitarian ends, to some extent.
Only if the regard is deep, though, only if we so highly value the other’s well-being that we are willing to thoroughly restructure and revise our own goals to accommodate it, and only if this restructuring is so well-rooted that it instantly and automatically informs our reactions to the person and to news that could affect him or her, do we possess real love.
Conjugal love involves all this, certainly.
But it is also more than this.
In conjugal love, one commits oneself to seeing one’s life always with the other in view.
One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, always in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other.
One’s life becomes a co-authored work.
The love one feels for a young child may in some ways be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love.
One expects nothing back from a young child.
One needn’t share ideals to enjoy parental love.
The child will grow away into his or her own separate life, independent of the parents’ preferences.
Conjugal love, because it involves the collaborative construction of a joint life, can’t be unconditional in that way.
If the partners don’t share values and a vision, they can’t steer a mutual course.
If one partner develops a separate vision or does not openly and in good faith work with the other toward their joint goals, conjugal love is impossible and is, at best, replaced with some more general type of loving concern.
Nonetheless, to dwell on the conditionality of conjugal love, and to develop a set of contingency plans should it fail, is already to depart from the project of jointly fabricating a life and to begin to develop a set of individual goals and values opposing those of the partner.
Conjugal love requires an implacable, automatic commitment to responding to all major life events through the mutual lens of marriage.
One cannot embody such a commitment if one harbors persistent thoughts about the contingency of the relationship and serious back-up plans.
There may be an appearance of paradox in the idea that conjugal love requires a lifelong commitment without contingency plans, yet at the same time is conditional in a way parental love is not.
But there is no paradox.
If one believes that something is permanent, one can make lifelong promises and commitments contingent upon it, because one believes the contingency will never come to pass.
This then, is the significance of the marriage ceremony: It is the expression of a mutual unshakeable commitment to build a joint life together, where each partner’s commitment is possible, despite the contingency of conjugal love, because each partner trusts the other’s commitment to be unshakeable.
A deep faith and trust must therefore underlie true conjugal love.
That trust is the most sacred and inviolable thing in a marriage, because it is the very foundation of its possibility.
Deception and faithlessness destroy conjugal love because, and exactly to the extent that, they undermine the grounds of that trust.
For the same reason, honest and open interchange about long-standing goals and attitudes stands at the heart of marriage.
Passion alone can’t ground conjugal trust.
Neither can shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other’s company.
Both partners must have matured enough that their core values are stable.
They must be unselfish enough to lay everything on the table for compromise, apart from those permanent, shared core values.
And they must be shorn of the tendency to form secret, individual goals.
Only to the degree they approach these ideals are they worthy of the trust that makes conjugal love possible.
Pasted from <http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ConjugalLove.htm>
"A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner, neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify for usefulness and happiness." -- Anonymous
For Joseph, also, Egypt served two opposing functions. On the one hand, it formed a true proving ground for him, since it was here that he was most severely tested. On the other, Egypt gave him refuge from his brothers’ jealousies, which had plagued him throughout his youth. Perhaps here Joseph would be more likely to succeed or fail on his own merits rather than succumbing to the contrary winds of his father’s favoritism and his brothers’ hatred and repression.
It is easy to see why Joseph should hold such a fascination for biblical scholars, as well as for literary figures, such as Thomas Mann, who wrote a four-volume work on the theme of Joseph and his brothers. But it seems to me that Joseph should be of greatest interest to us, his posterity. Not only is he a great historical and religious figure, but he can also be a personal example to us, a model in our lives.
“Now Joseph, commending all his affairs to God, did not betake himself to make his defence, nor to give an account of the exact circumstances of the fact, but silently underwent the bonds and the distress he was in, firmly believing that God, who knew the cause of his affliction and the truth of the fact, would be more powerful than those that inflicted the punishments upon him”
/***
|Name|TiddlerTweakerPlugin|
|Source|http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#TiddlerTweakerPlugin|
|Version|2.4.4|
|Author|Eric Shulman|
|License|http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#LegalStatements|
|~CoreVersion|2.1|
|Type|plugin|
|Description|select multiple tiddlers and modify author, created, modified and/or tag values|
~TiddlerTweaker is a 'power tool' for TiddlyWiki authors. Select multiple tiddlers from a listbox and 'bulk modify' the creator, author, created, modified and/or tag values of those tiddlers using a compact set of form fields. The values you enter into the fields simultaneously overwrite the existing values in all tiddlers you have selected.
!!!!!Usage
<<<
{{{<<tiddlerTweaker>>}}}
{{smallform{<<tiddlerTweaker>>}}}
By default, any tags you enter into the TiddlerTweaker will //replace// the existing tags in all the tiddlers you have selected. However, you can also use TiddlerTweaker to quickly filter specified tags from the selected tiddlers, while leaving any other tags assigned to those tiddlers unchanged:
>Any tag preceded by a '+' (plus) or '-' (minus), will be added or removed from the existing tags //instead of replacing the entire tag definition// of each tiddler (e.g., enter '-excludeLists' to remove that tag from all selected tiddlers. When using this syntax, care should be taken to ensure that //every// tag is preceded by '+' or '-', to avoid inadvertently overwriting any other existing tags on the selected tiddlers. (note: the '+' or '-' prefix on each tag value is NOT part of the tag value, and is only used by TiddlerTweaker to control how that tag value is processed)
Important Notes:
* TiddlerTweaker is a 'power user' tool that can make changes to many tiddlers at once. ''You should always have a recent backup of your document (or 'save changes' just *before* tweaking the tiddlers), just in case you accidentally 'shoot yourself in the foot'.''
* The date and author information on any tiddlers you tweak will ONLY be updated if the corresponding checkboxes have been selected. As a general rule, after using TiddlerTweaker, always ''//remember to save your document//'' when you are done, even though the tiddler timeline tab may not show any recently modified tiddlers.
* Selecting and updating all tiddlers in a document can take a while. Your browser may warn about an 'unresponsive script'. Usually, if you allow it to continue, it should complete the processing... eventually. Nonetheless, be sure to save your work before you begin tweaking lots of tiddlers, just in case something does get stuck.
<<<
!!!!!Revisions
<<<
2009.09.15 2.4.4 added 'edit' button. moved html definition to separate section
2009.09.13 2.4.3 in settiddlers(), convert backslashed chars (\n\b\s\t) in replacement text
2009.06.26 2.4.2 only add brackets around tags containing spaces
2009.06.22 2.4.1 in setFields(), add brackets around all tags shown tweaker edit field
2009.03.30 2.4.0 added 'sort by modifier'
2009.01.22 2.3.0 added support for text pattern find/replace
2008.10.27 2.2.3 in setTiddlers(), fixed Safari bug by replacing static Array.concat(...) with new Array().concat(...)
2008.09.07 2.2.2 added removeCookie() function for compatibility with [[CookieManagerPlugin]]
2008.05.12 2.2.1 replace built-in backstage tweak task with tiddler tweaker control panel (moved from BackstageTweaks)
2008.01.13 2.2.0 added 'auto-selection' links: all, changed, tags, title, text
2007.12.26 2.1.0 added support for managing 'creator' custom field (see [[CoreTweaks]])
2007.11.01 2.0.3 added config.options.txtTweakerSortBy for cookie-based persistence of list display order preference setting.
2007.09.28 2.0.2 in settiddlers() and deltiddlers(), added suspend/resume notification handling (improves performance when operating on multiple tiddlers)
2007.08.03 2.0.1 added shadow definition for [[TiddlerTweaker]] tiddler for use as parameter references with {{{<<tiddler>>, <<slider>> or <<tabs>>}}} macros.
2007.08.03 2.0.0 converted from inline script
2006.01.01 1.0.0 initial release
<<<
!!!!!Code
***/
//{{{
version.extensions.TiddlerTweakerPlugin= {major: 2, minor: 4, revision: 4, date: new Date(2009,9,15)};
// shadow tiddler
config.shadowTiddlers.TiddlerTweaker='<<tiddlerTweaker>>';
// defaults
if (config.options.txtTweakerSortBy==undefined) config.options.txtTweakerSortBy='modified';
// backstage task
if (config.tasks) { // for TW2.2b3 or above
config.tasks.tweak.tooltip='review/modify tiddler internals: dates, authors, tags, etc.';
config.tasks.tweak.content='{{smallform small groupbox{<<tiddlerTweaker>>}}}';
}
// if removeCookie() function is not defined by TW core, define it here.
if (window.removeCookie===undefined) {
window.removeCookie=function(name) {
document.cookie = name+'=; expires=Thu, 01-Jan-1970 00:00:01 UTC; path=/;';
}
}
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker = {
handler: function(place,macroName,params,wikifier,paramString,tiddler) {
var span=createTiddlyElement(place,'span');
span.innerHTML=store.getTiddlerText('TiddlerTweakerPlugin##html');
this.init(span.getElementsByTagName('form')[0],config.options.txtTweakerSortBy);
},
init: function(f,sortby) { // initialize form controls
if (!f) return; // form might not be rendered yet...
while (f.list.options[0]) f.list.options[0]=null; // empty current list content
var tids=store.getTiddlers(sortby);
if (sortby=='size') // descending order
tids.sort(function(a,b) {return a.text.length > b.text.length ? -1 : (a.text.length == b.text.length ? 0 : +1);});
var who='';
for (i=0; i<tids.length; i++) { var t=tids[i];
var label=t.title; var value=t.title;
switch (sortby) {
case 'modified':
case 'created':
var t=tids[tids.length-i-1]; // reverse order
var when=t[sortby].formatString('YY.0MM.0DD 0hh:0mm ');
label=when+t.title;
value=t.title;
break;
case 'size':
label='['+t.text.length+'] '+label;
break;
case 'modifier':
case 'creator':
if (who!=t[sortby]) {
who=t[sortby];
f.list.options[f.list.length]=new Option('by '+who+':','',false,false);
}
label='\xa0\xa0\xa0'+label; // indent
break;
}
f.list.options[f.list.length]=new Option(label,value,false,false);
}
f.title.value=f.who.value=f.creator.value=f.tags.value='';
f.cm.value=f.cd.value=f.cy.value=f.ch.value=f.cn.value='';
f.mm.value=f.md.value=f.my.value=f.mh.value=f.mn.value='';
f.stats.disabled=f.set.disabled=f.del.disabled=f.edit.disabled=f.display.disabled=true;
f.settitle.disabled=false;
config.options.txtTweakerSortBy=sortby;
f.sortby.value=sortby; // sync droplist
if (sortby!='modified') saveOptionCookie('txtTweakerSortBy');
else removeCookie('txtTweakerSortBy');
},
selecttiddlers: function(here) { // enables/disables inputs based on #items selected
var f=here.form; var list=f.list;
var c=0; for (i=0;i<list.length;i++) if (list.options[i].selected) c++;
if (c>1) f.title.disabled=true;
if (c>1) f.settitle.checked=false;
f.set.disabled=(c==0);
f.del.disabled=(c==0);
f.edit.disabled=(c==0);
f.display.disabled=(c==0);
f.settitle.disabled=(c>1);
f.stats.disabled=(c==0);
var msg=(c==0)?'select tiddlers':(c+' tiddler'+(c!=1?'s':'')+' selected');
here.previousSibling.firstChild.firstChild.nextSibling.innerHTML=msg;
if (c) clearMessage(); else displayMessage('no tiddlers selected');
},
setfields: function(here) { // set fields from first selected tiddler
var f=here.form;
if (!here.value.length) {
f.title.value=f.who.value=f.creator.value=f.tags.value='';
f.cm.value=f.cd.value=f.cy.value=f.ch.value=f.cn.value='';
f.mm.value=f.md.value=f.my.value=f.mh.value=f.mn.value='';
return;
}
var tid=store.getTiddler(here.value); if (!tid) return;
f.title.value=tid.title;
f.who.value=tid.modifier;
f.creator.value=tid.fields['creator']||''; // custom field - might not exist
f.tags.value=tid.tags.map(function(t){return String.encodeTiddlyLink(t)}).join(' ');
var c=tid.created; var m=tid.modified;
f.cm.value=c.getMonth()+1;
f.cd.value=c.getDate();
f.cy.value=c.getFullYear();
f.ch.value=c.getHours();
f.cn.value=c.getMinutes();
f.mm.value=m.getMonth()+1;
f.md.value=m.getDate();
f.my.value=m.getFullYear();
f.mh.value=m.getHours();
f.mn.value=m.getMinutes();
},
settiddlers: function(here) {
var f=here.form; var list=f.list;
var tids=[];
for (i=0;i<list.length;i++) if (list.options[i].selected) tids.push(list.options[i].value);
if (!tids.length) { alert('please select at least one tiddler'); return; }
var cdate=new Date(f.cy.value,f.cm.value-1,f.cd.value,f.ch.value,f.cn.value);
var mdate=new Date(f.my.value,f.mm.value-1,f.md.value,f.mh.value,f.mn.value);
if (tids.length>1 && !confirm('Are you sure you want to update these tiddlers:\n\n'+tids.join(', '))) return;
store.suspendNotifications();
for (t=0;t<tids.length;t++) {
var tid=store.getTiddler(tids[t]); if (!tid) continue;
var title=!f.settitle.checked?tid.title:f.title.value;
var who=!f.setwho.checked?tid.modifier:f.who.value;
var text=tid.text;
if (f.replacetext.checked) {
var r=f.replacement.value.replace(/\\t/mg,'\t').unescapeLineBreaks();
text=text.replace(new RegExp(f.pattern.value,'mg'),r);
}
var tags=tid.tags;
if (f.settags.checked) {
var intags=f.tags.value.readBracketedList();
var addtags=[]; var deltags=[]; var reptags=[];
for (i=0;i<intags.length;i++) {
if (intags[i].substr(0,1)=='+')
addtags.push(intags[i].substr(1));
else if (intags[i].substr(0,1)=='-')
deltags.push(intags[i].substr(1));
else
reptags.push(intags[i]);
}
if (reptags.length)
tags=reptags;
if (addtags.length)
tags=new Array().concat(tags,addtags);
if (deltags.length)
for (i=0;i<deltags.length;i++)
{ var pos=tags.indexOf(deltags[i]); if (pos!=-1) tags.splice(pos,1); }
}
if (!f.setcdate.checked) cdate=tid.created;
if (!f.setmdate.checked) mdate=tid.modified;
store.saveTiddler(tid.title,title,text,who,mdate,tags,tid.fields);
if (f.setcreator.checked) store.setValue(tid.title,'creator',f.creator.value); // set creator
if (f.setcdate.checked) tid.assign(null,null,null,null,null,cdate); // set create date
}
store.resumeNotifications();
this.init(f,f.sortby.value);
},
displaytiddlers: function(here,edit) {
var f=here.form; var list=f.list;
var tids=[];
for (i=0; i<list.length;i++) if (list.options[i].selected) tids.push(list.options[i].value);
if (!tids.length) { alert('please select at least one tiddler'); return; }
story.displayTiddlers(story.findContainingTiddler(f),tids,edit?DEFAULT_EDIT_TEMPLATE:null);
},
deltiddlers: function(here) {
var f=here.form; var list=f.list;
var tids=[];
for (i=0;i<list.length;i++) if (list.options[i].selected) tids.push(list.options[i].value);
if (!tids.length) { alert('please select at least one tiddler'); return; }
if (!confirm('Are you sure you want to delete these tiddlers:\n\n'+tids.join(', '))) return;
store.suspendNotifications();
for (t=0;t<tids.length;t++) {
var tid=store.getTiddler(tids[t]); if (!tid) continue;
if (tid.tags.contains('systemConfig')) {
var msg=tid.title+' is tagged with systemConfig.'
+'\n\nRemoving this tiddler may cause unexpected results. Are you sure?';
if (!confirm(msg)) continue;
}
store.removeTiddler(tid.title);
story.closeTiddler(tid.title);
}
store.resumeNotifications();
this.init(f,f.sortby.value);
},
stats: function(here) {
var f=here.form; var list=f.list; var tids=[]; var out=''; var tot=0;
var target=f.nextSibling;
for (i=0;i<list.length;i++) if (list.options[i].selected) tids.push(list.options[i].value);
if (!tids.length) { alert('please select at least one tiddler'); return; }
for (t=0;t<tids.length;t++) {
var tid=store.getTiddler(tids[t]); if (!tid) continue;
out+='[['+tid.title+']] '+tid.text.length+'\n'; tot+=tid.text.length;
}
var avg=tot/tids.length;
out=tot+' bytes in '+tids.length+' selected tiddlers ('+avg+' bytes/tiddler)\n<<<\n'+out+'<<<\n';
removeChildren(target);
target.innerHTML="<hr><font size=-2><a href='javascript:;' style='float:right' "
+"onclick='this.parentNode.parentNode.style.display=\"none\"'>close</a></font>";
wikify(out,target);
target.style.display='block';
}
};
//}}}
/***
//{{{
!html
<style>
.tiddlerTweaker table,
.tiddlerTweaker table tr,
.tiddlerTweaker table td
{ padding:0;margin:0;border:0;white-space:nowrap; }
</style><form class='tiddlerTweaker'><!--
--><table style="width:100%"><tr valign="top"><!--
--><td style="text-align:center;width:99%;"><!--
--><font size=-2><div style="text-align:left;"><span style="float:right"><!--
--> <a href="javascript:;"
title="select all tiddlers"
onclick="
var f=this; while (f&&f.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='form')f=f.parentNode;
for (var t=0; t<f.list.options.length; t++)
if (f.list.options[t].value.length) f.list.options[t].selected=true;
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(f.list);
return false">all</a><!--
--> <a href="javascript:;"
title="select tiddlers that are new/changed since the last file save"
onclick="
var lastmod=new Date(document.lastModified);
var f=this; while (f&&f.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='form')f=f.parentNode;
for (var t=0; t<f.list.options.length; t++) {
var tid=store.getTiddler(f.list.options[t].value);
f.list.options[t].selected=tid&&tid.modified>lastmod;
}
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(f.list);
return false">changed</a><!--
--> <a href="javascript:;"
title="select tiddlers with at least one matching tag"
onclick="
var t=prompt('Enter space-separated tags (match ONE)');
if (!t||!t.length) return false;
var tags=t.readBracketedList();
var f=this; while (f&&f.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='form')f=f.parentNode;
for (var t=0; t<f.list.options.length; t++) {
f.list.options[t].selected=false;
var tid=store.getTiddler(f.list.options[t].value);
if (tid&&tid.tags.containsAny(tags)) f.list.options[t].selected=true;
}
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(f.list);
return false">tags</a><!--
--> <a href="javascript:;"
title="select tiddlers whose titles include matching text"
onclick="
var txt=prompt('Enter a title (or portion of a title) to match');
if (!txt||!txt.length) return false;
var f=this; while (f&&f.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='form')f=f.parentNode;
for (var t=0; t<f.list.options.length; t++) {
f.list.options[t].selected=f.list.options[t].value.indexOf(txt)!=-1;
}
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(f.list);
return false">titles</a><!--
--> <a href="javascript:;"
title="select tiddlers containing matching text"
onclick="
var txt=prompt('Enter tiddler text (content) to match');
if (!txt||!txt.length) return false;
var f=this; while (f&&f.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='form')f=f.parentNode;
for (var t=0; t<f.list.options.length; t++) {
var tt=store.getTiddlerText(f.list.options[t].value,'');
f.list.options[t].selected=(tt.indexOf(txt)!=-1);
}
config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(f.list);
return false">text</a> <!--
--></span><span>select tiddlers</span><!--
--></div><!--
--></font><select multiple name=list size="11" style="width:99.99%"
title="use click, shift-click and/or ctrl-click to select multiple tiddler titles"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.selecttiddlers(this)"
onchange="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.setfields(this)"><!--
--></select><br><!--
-->show<input type=text size=1 value="11"
onchange="this.form.list.size=this.value; this.form.list.multiple=(this.value>1);"><!--
-->by<!--
--><select name=sortby size=1
onchange="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.init(this.form,this.value)"><!--
--><option value="title">title</option><!--
--><option value="size">size</option><!--
--><option value="modified">modified</option><!--
--><option value="created">created</option><!--
--><option value="modifier">modifier</option><!--
--></select><!--
--><input type="button" value="refresh"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.init(this.form,this.form.sortby.value)"<!--
--> <input type="button" name="stats" disabled value="totals..."
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.stats(this)"><!--
--></td><td style="width:1%"><!--
--><div style="text-align:left"><font size=-2> modify values</font></div><!--
--><table style="width:100%;"><tr><!--
--><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=settitle unchecked
title="allow changes to tiddler title (rename tiddler)"
onclick="this.form.title.disabled=!this.checked">title<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=title size=35 style="width:98%" disabled><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=setcreator unchecked
title="allow changes to tiddler creator"
onclick="this.form.creator.disabled=!this.checked">created by<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px;"><!--
--><input type=text name=creator size=35 style="width:98%" disabled><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=setwho unchecked
title="allow changes to tiddler author"
onclick="this.form.who.disabled=!this.checked">modified by<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=who size=35 style="width:98%" disabled><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=setcdate unchecked
title="allow changes to created date"
onclick="var f=this.form;
f.cm.disabled=f.cd.disabled=f.cy.disabled=f.ch.disabled=f.cn.disabled=!this.checked"><!--
-->created on<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=cm size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> / <input type=text name=cd size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> / <input type=text name=cy size=4 style="width:3em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> at <input type=text name=ch size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> : <input type=text name=cn size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=setmdate unchecked
title="allow changes to modified date"
onclick="var f=this.form;
f.mm.disabled=f.md.disabled=f.my.disabled=f.mh.disabled=f.mn.disabled=!this.checked"><!--
-->modified on<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=mm size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> / <input type=text name=md size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> / <input type=text name=my size=4 style="width:3em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> at <input type=text name=mh size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--> : <input type=text name=mn size=2 style="width:2em;padding:0;text-align:center" disabled><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=replacetext unchecked
title="find/replace matching text"
onclick="this.form.pattern.disabled=this.form.replacement.disabled=!this.checked">replace text<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=pattern size=15 value="" style="width:40%" disabled
title="enter TEXT PATTERN (regular expression)"> with<!--
--><input type=text name=replacement size=15 value="" style="width:40%" disabled
title="enter REPLACEMENT TEXT"><!--
--></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=checkbox name=settags checked
title="allow changes to tiddler tags"
onclick="this.form.tags.disabled=!this.checked">tags<!--
--></td><td style="padding:1px"><!--
--><input type=text name=tags size=35 value="" style="width:98%"
title="enter new tags or use '+tag' and '-tag' to add/remove tags from existing tags"><!--
--></td></tr></table><!--
--><div style="text-align:center"><!--
--><nobr><input type=button name=display disabled style="width:24%" value="display"
title="show selected tiddlers"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.displaytiddlers(this,false)"><!--
--> <input type=button name=edit disabled style="width:23%" value="edit"
title="edit selected tiddlers"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.displaytiddlers(this,true)"><!--
--> <input type=button name=del disabled style="width:24%" value="delete"
title="remove selected tiddlers"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.deltiddlers(this)"><!--
--> <input type=button name=set disabled style="width:24%" value="update"
title="update selected tiddlers"
onclick="config.macros.tiddlerTweaker.settiddlers(this)"></nobr><!--
--></div><!--
--></td></tr></table><!--
--></form><span style="display:none"><!--content replaced by tiddler "stats"--></span>
!end
//}}}
***/
"You may not be able to control the success you have, but don't let that influence how hard you work." -- Elder Earl C. Tingey
"To be a saint is to be an exception; to be a true man is the rule. Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright. To sin as little as possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels. All earthly things are subject to sin; it is like the force of gravity." p 29-30
<html>Let me piece together what I have learned about why I was right to choose to try to win such a mentor and yet why I did not. I’d boil down what to look for in identifying a great potential mentor to three characteristics. And he had them all. First, and surely most important, he had understanding about the world I was trying to navigate. He didn’t just know facts about it; he had understanding about the world I was trying to navigate. He didn’t just know facts about it; he had a map, and a good one. And I know now what kind of a map matters most—it’s one that will show you where value will lie in the future. He didn’t just know decision theory and organizational theory; he had a sense of where the combination was going and what would be of most worth to the people working on that combination as we went. He had the capacity to say, “This contribution or that contribution will make the most difference.”
</html>
-- mentors have to be won, not stumbled into.
The mentors of most worth that I have known have a feeling of urgency in their own work that makes slow response from you seem a sign of disinterest. And this lack of interest looks a lot like lack of trust. So, if the mentor says he or she would be willing to talk about your work on Tuesday, my hard-won advice is to deliver something less than perfect early Monday.
-- Just get something out the door, a version 1.0
Source: [[To Choose and Keep a Mentor - Henry B. Eyring|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11369&x=54&y=8]]
<html> Two other characteristics of a great mentor, which I could only know he had when I got into the interview, are common to all great mentors I have known: integrity and generosity.</html>
Source: [[To Choose and Keep a Mentor - Henry B. Eyring|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11369&x=47&y=10]]
<html>They all stem from your losing your trust in the mentor. You can make that obvious by following the mentor’s vision. Another way, and one you may not even notice yourself doing, is to show your waning trust by the way you confront the mentor. It’s not a clear line, but there is a region of challenge where you are choosing to end the relationship. Mentors are generous, and they like to help creative people. So they are used to some “pushing back” from those whom they counsel. But I will tell you one way to know when you have made a choice that is likely irreversible. It is a simple one: When you move from asking penetrating questions and suggesting tentative ideas to trying to change the mentor’s map, you have chosen to end the relationship. </html>
Source: [[To Choose and Keep a Mentor - Henry B. Eyring|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11369&x=47&y=10]]
<html>The mentors of most worth that I have known have a feeling of urgency in their own work that makes slow response from you seem a sign of disinterest. And this lack of interest looks a lot like lack of trust. So, if the mentor says he or she would be willing to talk about your work on Tuesday, my hard-won advice is to deliver something less than perfect early Monday. </html>
Source: [[To Choose and Keep a Mentor - Henry B. Eyring|http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11369&x=47&y=10]]
<html>If you want to find a woman to date, try not to filter in favor of big breasts, for example, since this is a popular filter. People watch MTV, demand goes up, supply goes down -- competition for big breasts in the real world is fierce. And this really isn't that good a filter, anyway. Physical beauty can take many forms. Cultivate an attraction (yes, I do think there's some choice) in a less popular physical feature. For women, an analog is height -- figure out a way to like short men and you'll trade up big time on other important factors like personality.</html>
Source: [[Ben Casnocha: The Blog: To Find Good, Underrated People, De-Emphasize Popular Filters|http://ben.casnocha.com/2008/07/to-find-good-pe.html]]
"Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived."
<html>Life is tough ….. It’s even tougher if you’re stupid.<br>
- John Wayne (<small>HT SCH</small>)</html>
Source: [[Long or Short Capital » Quotes - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06|http://longorshortcapital.com/research/quotes/page/2]]
"Sometimes, if they were awake, they would hear him at a late hour pacing up and down the paths. Peaceful in his solitude, adoring, matching the tranquility of the heavens with the tranquility of his own heartbeat, ravished in the shadows by the visible and invisible splendors of God, he opened his spirit to the thoughts coming from the Unknown. At those moments, when he offered up his heart in the hour when the night flowers offer up their scent, himself illumined in the bestarred night and unfolding in ecstasy amid the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said what took place in his spirit, what went out from him and what entered in: a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and infinity of the universe." p 67
"If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he could be and what he ought to be, he will become what he ought to be." -- Goethe (1 Nephi 16:18-32)
"I act towards people, not react. I have a sense of inner balance; I know who I am, what I stand for, and how I should behave. I refuse to return incivility for incivility, because then I would no longer be in control of my conduct."
Mosiah 7:33
"If ye will turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him, and serve him with all diligence of mind, if ye do this, he will, according to his own will and pleasure, deliver you out of bondage."
Twenty-three by Liam Rector
When he was 23 and beautiful
He liked to hang around
With other beautiful people.
He liked to get intoxicated with them,
Have sex with them, make money
With them. Among them,
He found, one did not have to strain.
Other people
Wanted to hang around with them
And came bearing gifts,
A little something. (These
Gift-bearers were a lot like
Politics itself is, "Showbiz
For ugly people.") In this world
If anything went wrong there
Was always enough money around
To cover it. After he was through
With this crowd he started hanging
Out with a bunch of academic
Gangsters. These were
A different crew altogether:
Smart, on the main, but mean
And eaten alive by resentment.
They never had enough money
And were bitter beyond belief,
Compared, say,
To a troupe of electricians.
Freud said somewhere
In our unconscious
We are always 23.
"Other people see things and say why, but I dream things that never were and say 'why not?' The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask 'why not?' -- Spencer W. Kimball
[After stealing a coin from a young boy on the road, after having left the bishop's house, Valjean tries to find the boy to return it. He cannot.] "'Vile wretch that I am!' His heart overflowed and he wept, for the first time in nineteen years." p 115
Vanishing Point by Freya Manfred
The moment arrives when you say,
"I don't dislike this man,
but how did I marry him?"
Something about his wintry voice,
the way he can't or won't show his face,
and how small and alone you feel
out here on earth's curve,
driving day and night,
never reaching a destination,
until you realize you're running parallel to him,
and you'll never meet.
The moment arrives when you say,
"I don't dislike this man,
but how did I marry him?"
Something about his wintry voice,
the way he can't or won't show his face,
and how small and alone you feel
out here on earth's curve,
driving day and night,
never reaching a destination,
until you realize you're running parallel to him,
and you'll never meet.
"He felt his courage leave him, a flock of birds leaving a tree."
"Their lives began and ended in each breath."
"His mortality shrank to a concept."
"The climbers all felt the peak's menace, as if they had provoked some huge enemy."
"The cold drove their wits from them. They were down to awareness."
"Spirituality is the consciousness of victory over self." -- David O. McKay
"Though our view of eternity is reasonably clear, it is often our view of the next mile that is obscured." -- Neal A. Maxwell
"Violence is not strength. Compassion is not weakness."
Camelot
"There was none of that low hum, that bass line of wryness or tenderness that you expect with someone who mattered."
-- like the use of bass line
"Only her husky voice and snapping blue eyes were as I remembered, but the bass line was still there -- indeed, I was reminded that our relationship was always bass line and nothing but."
"...seeking answers in strangers eyes."
"...she'd always thought of me as a "lion, lazy but strong."
'...and then kissed, shyly, in the sunlit patch by the ladderway."
"My greatest danger is in the everydayness."
"...with a large, friendly, crotch-nosing dog"
"In those days I viewed the clitoris as something of an urban legend."
"If he'd had a heart, I would have crushed it."
"Sometimes remembered lightning was just a lighting bug."
<html><li>Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.</li>
<li>Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.</li>
<li>Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.</li>
<li>Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.</li>
<li>Start as close to the end as possible.</li>
<li>Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.</li>
<li>Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.</li>
<li>Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.</li></html>
Source: [[Kurt Vonnegut - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut#Writing]]
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
~ Marcel Proust
This is where I clip stuff from the web and from books I read. Search or browse by time, title, or tag (usually subject and author are in there). Click on the right-hand navigation bar and crap will start popping up. Click on them to close.
If you think some of it is interesting, subscribe to the feed [[here|http://www.thingsarecool.com/Notebook.xml]].
Head back to my blog [[here|http://thingsarecool.blogspot.com]].
Drop dead [[here|http://ffffound.com/image/c0aaeb375b2b28feb52da23818e44a7ac6227cf5]].
[[What Startups Are Really Like|http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html]]
"Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire."
<html>If you are the kind of person who wants his or her voice to be heard (as most of us are), there’s little incentive to playing things down the middle, for then your voice won’t be heard. Voicing an ideological extreme, therefore — whether or not it’s truly how you feel — is an exercise of narcissism, for you’ll stand out in a crowd. And considering how costly other forms of narcissism can be, spouting a super-ideological viewpoint in fact comes pretty cheap.</html>
Source: [[Whats With All the Ideology? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog|http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/whats-with-all-the-ideology/#more-3242]]
<html>In English, I was supervising a group of Russians whose enthusiasm often took the form of suicide </html>
Source: [[White Sun of the Desert - Sage|chrome://sage/content/feedsummary.html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.desertsun.co.uk%2Fblog%2F%3Ffeed%3Datom]]
"Greatness is a product of many causes. It is like the mighty flowing river fed and made possible y thousands of mountain rivulets. Even so, with Joseph Smith. The reflction from innumerable facets of his character makes up the picture of Joseph Smith's greatness." -- John A. Widstoe
"Do you think you can use the money you have earned in this life as currency in the next? Put Heavenly Father first in your life. Commit to follow him and obey his commandments and strive everyday to become more Christ-like. Focus your effort on obtaining heavenly riches." -- Joseph B. Wirthlin
"How well am I doing in helping others reach their potential? Do I support others, or do I tear them down. If your tearing others down, you are tearing down the kingdom of god." -- Joseph B. Wirthlin
We pile up words, words, and more words, the very words we talked about elsewhere, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, and, however we try, however hard we struggle, we always find ourselves outside the feelings we so ingenuously hoped to describe, as if a feeling were like a landscape with mountains in the distance and trees in the foreground. P 97
"Work is the only weapon against life's tragedies." John Steinbeck
"No rest for the idler; nothing but the iron grip of incessant struggle. You don't want to earn your living honestly, do a job, fulfill a duty; the thought of being like other men bores you. But the end is the same. Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment. Not wanting to be a workman you will become a slave. If work failes to get you with one hand it will get you with the other; you won't treat it as a friend, and so you will become its Negro slave." p 793
"He was a man who had endured all the forms of suffering and was still bleeding from the wounds inflicted upon him by life."
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." WB Yeats
"When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep."
Pasted from <http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_butler_yeats/quotes>
Jesus said: “Learn of me. … For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:29–30.)
Pasted from <http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dll/Magazines/Ensign/1988.htm/ensign%20august%201988.htm/first%20presidency%20message%20with%20all%20thy%20getting%20get%20understanding.htm>
According to popular wisdom, you can't have everything, and there's a good deal of truth in that, the balance of human lives is constantly swinging back and forth between what is gained and what is lost, the problem lies in the equally human impossibility of coming to an agreement on the relative merits of what should be lost and what should be gained, which is why the world is in the state it is. P 103.
canapé n. A cracker or a small, thin piece of bread or toast spread with cheese, meat, or relish and served as an appetizer
deshabillé -
the state of being carelessly or partially dressed
Pasted from <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/deshabille>
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
<html>If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.</html>
Source: [[kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products|http://www.kottke.org/]]
<html>Students now were to accept preordained general principles—such as the pernicious legacy of European colonialism and imperialism and the pathologies of capitalism, homophobia, and sexism—and then deductively to demonstrate how such crimes manifested themselves in history, literature, and science.</html>
Source: [[The Humanities Move Off Campus by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Autumn 2008|http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_classical_education.html]]
Sartorial - 1.
of or pertaining to tailors or their trade: sartorial workmanship.
2.
of or pertaining to clothing or style or manner of dress: sartorial splendor.
Pasted from <http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sartorial&x=0&y=0>
<html><big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">In Sum:</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">1. Find a subject you care about</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">2. Do not ramble, though</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">3. Keep it simple</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">4. Have guts to cut</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">5. Sound like yourself</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">6. Say what you mean</span></big><br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<br style="font-family: Georgia;">
<big><span style="font-family: Georgia;">7. Pity the readers</span></big></html>
Source: [[vonnegutSTYLE|http://literature.sdsu.edu/onWRITING/vonnegutSTYLE.html]]
<html>We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.</html>
Source: [[kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products|http://www.kottke.org/]]