Minder weet, meer wonder

--- Poet Wilma Stockenström in her collection "Hierdie Mens" (2013).

Dit wil-wil
Noudat die somer sy laaste asem,
goud en bruin, uitblaas oor die stad
skrik ek vir die kennis wat ek dra,
al aan die een kant, en gaandeweg
hel ek oor na inval by wending.
Dis goed om op te ruim, feite,
die dooie vlieë, met die skoppie
uit te gooi. Minder weet, meer wonder.
Dit wil-wil winter word.

NodeXL is like a point-and-shoot digital camera for social media

--- Marc Smith in an interview with Kirk Englehardt, Unraveling the Mysteries of Your Twitter Network,  Dec 3, 2014.

Full quote

NodeXL is like a point-and-shoot digital camera for social media: it quickly takes a photo of the crowds that have formed in online spaces

Most of my portraits would have been better if had removed the figures

--- Andrew Wyeth, recording from the Meryman Archive, quoted by Charles Brock in his essay Through a Glass: Windows in the Art of Wyeth, Sheeler, and Hopper, in the exhibition volume Andrew Wyeth: Looking out, looking in, D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2014.

In context, from p. 67 as cited above:

Wyeth ultimately came to believe that his urge to create an art that could somehow articulate the dualities and paradoxes of his experience was constrained by his portrait practice concluding that, “Most of my portraits would have been better if had removed the figures.” [footnote 85 citing Meryman Archive] Interiors and exteriors without figures and mediated by windows alone proved to be a more effective vehicle for expressing the strange admixture of realism and abstraction, presence and detachment, connection and disconnection, intimacy and alienation that Wyeth sought.

Every action in social media creates a machine-readable edge

--- Marc Smith at 2014 Retail & Consumer Goods Analytics Summit (RCAS 2014), September 12, 2014, quoted by @CGTMagazine.

Source tweet: https://twitter.com/CGTMagazine/status/510547198917242880.

Great museums are like great cities: seen from without, their grandeur impresses, from within they are villages, , minuscule patches where a personal adventure can spring up and spread its wings

--- Christian Durieux, An Enchantment, Louvre Collection 2013.

Quote in context

In Watteau's paintings, there's the landscape, and mythology isn't far away either, but there's the intimate, the intimacy of two bodies seeking one another, whispering to one another. When I dreamt of the Louvre to create a story about it, I dreamt of intimacy in the grand theater décor. Great museums are like great cities: seen from without, their grandeur impresses, from within they are villages, minuscule patches where a personal adventure can spring up and spread its wings. And I dreamt of the great, intimate adventure in that grand décor. 

recognize the imagination, both as a kind of mind muscle, and also as a place

--- Michéle Roberts, Weinrebe lecture, Wolfson College, Oxford, March 7, 2013 at 13:12 (podcast)

Let me recognize the imagination, both as a kind of mind muscle, and also as a place, sometimes inner and sometimes outer, kind of a translucent bubble, often the only place I felt I truly existed.

Also , "invent comes from the Latin invenio, to come upon"

Don’t be motivated by achieving the ideal. Be motivated by compassion for yourself and helping others.

--- Leo Babauta, in The Frustratingly Slow Pace of Making Changes, June 6, 2014

Advice from the blog post:

Give up on the results. Instead focus on the step in front of you.
Give up on the fantasy. Instead be curious about what it’s really like when you try it.
Don’t be motivated by achieving the ideal. Be motivated by compassion for yourself and helping others.
Don’t be caught up in quick results. Savor the slow change.
Forget about the happiness of the outcome. Instead find happiness in the learning.
Don’t worry about perfect execution. The entire point is to learn about yourself.

Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds

--- Hanna Kokko, quoted in New Scientist sidebar to the story "The father enigma: Why do nature's devoted dads care?", vol. 222, no. 2973, 14 June 2014

Excerpt

"Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds," quips Hanna Kokko at the Australian National University in Canberra. In about 90 per cent of mammals, the male's role in reproduction stops at fertilisation – he couldn't care less what happens after that. "Birds, in contrast, have pair bonds, extra-pair copulations (as we call them politely) and divorce. They have all kinds of complicated social relationships, not so unlike humans," says Kokko.

... to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time ...

--- Sybille Bedford, from "A Compass Error", quoted by Candia McWilliam in her Weinrebe lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, (podcast)

Quote from http://www.sybillebedford.com/life/:

When one is young one doesn’t feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated at lib, to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

Knowing what thou knowest not is in a sense omniscience

--- Piet Hein, Danish poet/scientist/architect

One of his grooks, see http://www.leptonica.com/cachedpages/grooks/grooks.html

Knowing what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience

there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people

--- Michel de Montaigne, Essays II:1, transl. M. A. Screech, The Complete Essays, Penguin 1991 (p. 380)

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.

We must leave Christ for Christ

--- attr. to St Philip Neri, an Italian priest noted for founding a society of secular clergy called the "Congregation of the Oratory".

Meaning of the quote according to a pamphlet by Raleigh Addington of the London Oratory, pdf, cited by wikipedia:

When summoned to hear confessions or to see someone who had called, he came down instantly with the words “We must leave Christ for Christ”. Philip was a mystic of the highest order, a man of ecstasies and visions, whose greatest happiness was to be alone with God. Yet at the call of charity he gave up the delight of prayer and, instead, sought God by helping his neighbour. His whole life is that of the contemplative in action. 

Here's another anecdote from Addington:

Some young men were playing games in the warm Roman sunshine outside Philip Neri's room. When Baronius, the learned Church historian intent on his writing protested at the noise, Philip told them to go on. “So long as they don't sin”, he said, “they can chop wood on my back”.

the aim of regulation [should not be] to minimize interference [but] to maximize output

--- Ronald Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 2 (1959), p. 27, doi:10.2307/724927

Quote in context:

It is sometimes implied that the aim of regulation in the radio industry should be to minimize interference. But this would be wrong. The aim should be to maximize output. All property rights interfere with the ability of people to use resources. What has to be insured is that the gain from interference more than offsets the harm it produces. There is no reason to suppose that the optimum situation is one in which there is no interference. 

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude

--- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 46; via Mullainathan & Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013)

To thrive in sustained intimacy requires learning to provide not what we think someone else wants, or should want, but what actually makes him or her happy.

--- Kathryn Schulz, in her essay What Is It About Middlemarch?, in Vulture, January 13, 2014

Quote in context:

One of the oldest and most universal moral precepts is the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want them to treat you. . . .

It is also, on reflection, a little weird. For a guideline about how to treat others, the Golden Rule is strikingly egocentric. It does not urge us to consult our neighbors about their needs; it asks us only to generalize from ourselves—to imagine, in essence, that everyone’s idea of desirable treatment matches our own. . . .

Middlemarch breaks with this tradition. Morality does not start with the self, Eliot insists; it starts when we set the self aside. “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world?” she asks. And then: “I know no speck so troublesome as self.” What a killer line, and what a memorable image. We dwell in moral myopia; literally and figuratively, we are too close to ourselves.

Over and over in Middlemarch, Eliot urges us to refocus. When Rosamond Vincy, arguably the most self-absorbed character in the book, dismisses another woman as “so uninteresting,” the much kinder Mary Garth counters her: “She is interesting to herself, I suppose.” The problem Dorothea faces in her marriage is not how to support her husband, as she yearns to do, nor how to liberate herself from his thin tyrannies, as readers often yearn on her behalf, but how to accept that he has “an equivalent centre of self, whence the light and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” That self is not like Dorothea’s; no two selves are, not even so-called soul mates. That’s one reason why marriage lies beyond the reach of the Golden Rule: As Dorothea learns to her dismay, other people do not necessarily crave the treatment we expect them to appreciate. To thrive in sustained intimacy requires learning to provide not what we think someone else wants, or should want, but what actually makes him or her happy.

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full

--- C. G. Jung, CW, 9i, para 587, quoted by James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, p. x

From Jung’s A Study in the the Process of Individuation in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Volume 9, p. 335 (Google Books)

On the days following, the patient was overcome by feelings of self-pity. It became clear to her how much she regretted never having had any children. She felt like a neglected animal or a lost child. This mood grew into a regular Weltschmerz, and she felt like the “all-compassionate Tathagata” (Buddha). Only when she had completely given way to these feelings could she bring herself to paint another picture. Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full. 

Quote in Hollis's context:

In the midst of writing this book. I lost my beloved son, as have many other patients and parents. The sentences above were written long before. I can either curl up and die from grief or live toward the values he and I shared. Jung challenges us directly: “Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.” 

When change occurs, and especially change for the better, the principal motivating forces are to be found within the country

--- Derek Tonkin, from an article in the Myanmar Times, Myanmar and South Africa: Comparisons are fortuitous, but instructive, 13 December 2013

Quote in context:

There is an eternal truth which needs to be recognised in the experiences of both South Africa and Myanmar. It is that when change occurs, and especially change for the better, the principal motivating forces are to be found within the country. Change is rarely the result primarily of external pressures, however much the international community may claim to have been influential and to have adopted determining policies. 

You never get used to the cold, but you get used to being cold

--- NBC commentator (I think it was Troy Aikman) during NFL wild card game in Green Bay on Sunday Jan 5, 2014 between the 49ers and Packers

It would seem to be a truism that could/should apply to many discomforts and sufferings in life - not that I've got used to any of it, myself.