Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat

--- Leszek Kolakowski, in an essay titled “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture” (1973), quoted by Jack Miles in "Why God Will Not Die", The Atlantic, December 2014

The Kolakowski passage quoted in Miles's essay:

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.

Why is it that when people begin to relinquish the world, the first thing they relinquish is common sense?

--- Sri Aurobindo. Quoted by Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (1986, ppbk 1989), p. 109.

mense met ʼn aptyt / vir vuurvreet sal vonke skyt

-- TT Cloete, in Karnaval en Lent (2014), quoted by Andries Visagie in an interview/review with Ilse Salzwedel on Skrywers en Boeke, 30 April 2014, around time code 19:09 ff.; also quoted in the the Versindaba review by Zandra Bezuidenhout, 17 March 2014

if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it

--- C. G. Jung, "The Aims of Psychotherapy," 1933. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung; Read, H.,
Fordham, M., Adler, G., McGuire, W., Eds.; Hull, R.F.C., Trans.; Princeton University Press:
Princeton, NJ, USA, 1954; Volume 16. Para 86. Quoted by Caifang ZHU in "Jung on the Nature and Interpretation of Dreams: A Developmental Delineation with Cognitive Neuroscientific Responses," Behav. Sci. 2013, 3(4), 662-675; doi:10.3390/bs3040662.

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand

--- Putt's Law, from Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat (1981)

The book apparently also draws Putt's Corollary, "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." The wikipedia entry glosses this as incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management.

What is most difficult to resolve and cure is the patient’s practice of self-cure

--- psychoanalyst Masud Khan, in The Privacy of the Self, quoted by Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 194

In context (Phillips):

‘What is most difficult to resolve and cure,’ the psychoanalyst Masud Khan wrote in The Privacy of the Self, ‘is the patient’s practice of self-cure. To cure a cure is the paradox that faces us . . .’ Symptoms are always a form of self-cure; you first hear about your problem from your proposed solutions to it. The alcoholic is suffering from whatever conflict alcohol was initially a solution to, and then the solution becomes the problem. The real question is not, how can someone stop drinking, but rather what was the alcohol a self-cure for in the first case?

anxiety makes people jump to conclusions

--- Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012), p. 175

In context:

It becomes more and more difficult to be ‘originally’ mad; to avoid having a recognizable condition (and when we use the word ‘mad’ we don’t mean idiosyncratic). It is both comforting and confining — and can, indeed, be life-saving – when people in the know claim to know what we are suffering from. But mad people, as all these plays dramatize, make people jump to conclusions about them (anxiety makes people jump to conclusions); madness tempts people to be more knowing than they are. It certainly makes people work because they have something about someone that has to be dealt with (the mad are trying to make themselves impossible to ignore and impossible not to want to ignore).

Big Data (n): A system for documenting statistical coincidences

--- Martin Geddes, tweet, 21 March 2015

A ritual acts on us in a way that is deeper than words, deeper even than conscious thought.

--- Benjamin Dueholm, in "The host", Aeon Magazine, 25 November 2014

In context:

A ritual acts on us in a way that is deeper than words, deeper even than conscious thought. The words and thoughts change, after all, the scholars of religion tell us. As it is in the history of a religion, so it is in the course of a human life: the etiologies, the just-so stories, the philosophical and ideological layering all arrive late and leave early. The act itself somehow lingers underneath it all. Like a pebble in the shoe or a warm bath, it changes our minds despite our minds.

Another excerpts:

Whatever else one wishes to claim for this ritual, it is a communing with the dead. Every religious ritual is. It’s a way of putting on a self we can never be, of identifying with people otherwise lost to us, of inhabiting a past we can probably never understand. That might be the last radical lunge of this shrunken supper in a life that is starved for, if not love, then at least for connection.

If the goal of the United States is to be “ending tyranny in our world”, then is encouraging “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” the best way to go about it?

--- John Lewis Gaddis, in "Ending Tyranny," The American Interest, vol. 4, no. 1, Sep 1, 2008

In context

If that’s right, then President Bush may have proclaimed a doctrine for the 21st century comparable to the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the Truman Doctrine during the Cold War. Only historians not yet born will be able to say for sure. Even that possibility, however, should earn Bush’s memorable sentence greater scrutiny than it has so far received. For it raises an issue that future administrations—whether those of Obama, McCain or their successors—are going to have to resolve: If the goal of the United States is to be “ending tyranny in our world”, then is encouraging “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” the best way to go about it?

A few more excerpts from the piece:

The objective of ending tyranny, therefore, is as deeply rooted in American history as it is possible to imagine. President Bush, in a time of crisis for the future of democratization, followed Lincoln’s example in a much greater crisis for the future of the Union: He looked back for guidance to the Founders.

Spreading democracy suggests knowing the answer to how people should live their lives. Ending tyranny suggests freeing them to find their own answers. The Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin best explained this distinction half a century ago in his great essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”

 But was it ever likely that democracy would root itself in those parts of the world where people fear anarchy more than they do authority? Where the struggle to survive is a more urgent priority than securing the right to vote? Where the immense power of the United States gives rise to greater uneasiness than it does reassurance?

Every gift is a demand, usually for love

--- unknown. I saw it in a piece by Martin Geddes where he said,

As a wise person once told me, “every gift is a demand, usually for love”. 

He also tweeted it a couple of times:

second in January 2015: "@nntaleb "Every gift is a demand, usually for love", so a wise person once told me."

first in May 2014: "@NurtureGirl Every gift is a demand, usually for love... Sayeth a friend's therapist."

You get more done if you don't have to take the credit

--- I learned this from Dennis Stevenson.

However, similar quotes are ascribed to a variety of people according to Quote Investigator, S/he lists four basic versions, and assigns them as follows

A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it: In a diary entry for 1863, ascribed to a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland.

This was the opportunity for a man who likes to do a good thing in accordance with the noble maxim … “Never mind who gets the credit.” Published 1896, and the phrase “Never mind who gets the credit” was dubbed the noble maxim of Edward Everett Hale.

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them: Published 1905, ascribed to Benjamin Jowett, though later reassigned by one of the authors to a "Jesuit Father".

There is no limit to what a man can do who does not care who gains the credit for it: Used by Charles Edward Montague in 1906, who didn't take credit for it, ascribing it to a friend who often used it.

For a full discussion with references, see http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless/.

[re Google Street View] The German reaction is, ‘Oh my God, how can they do that?’

--- John Emerson, US ambassador to Germany, quoted on the Christian Science Monitor, "Europe pivots between safety and privacy online", 18 January 2015

Quote:

“What’s the first thing an American says when [he or she] sees Google Street View?” he says on a recent day at the US Embassy next to the Brandenburg Gate. “An American will go, ‘Hey, there’s Billy in the front yard.’ The German reaction is, ‘Oh my God, how can they do that?’ ”

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought... and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit

--- Ecclesiastes 2:11, King James Bible

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

Whatever you do, something about it should give you goose bumps. That's what gets me up every day.

--- Phillip Sheppard, quoted on twitter by Commerce+Creativity, 8 Jan 2015.

The 100th person at Google, no matter what you did, was better off than the average founding CEO of the average venture-backed startup in Silicon Valley

--- Peter Thiel, in an interview by Peter Slen on C-SPAN's Communicators, October 13, 2013

Peter Slen. Peter Thiel, what is the power law you talk about? 

Peter Thiel. [14:30] Well, the power law is this distribution in the size of these technology companies. If you look at the tech industry in the U.S., the top dozen tech companies have a market capitalization of abut $2 trillion, and they’re probably as big or bigger than all other tech companies combined. You end up with these radically unequal outcomes in terms of company sizes. Unlike the U.S. declaration of independence where all men are created equal, in the case of business not all companies are created equal and some end up being vastly more successful than others. As a venture capital investor, it’s typically the case that your single best investment ends up being worth more than all of the others combined. This is a very strange dynamic, and it’s worth thinking through a great deal. 

[15:20] An application of the power law to entrepreneurs, and to founders, is that it’s perhaps not always the right thing to start a company. You may be much better off joining a company that’s going to be very successful. The 100th person at Google, no matter what you did, was better off than the average founding CEO of the average venture-backed startup in Silicon Valley. We sometimes privilege founding companies too much, and we undervalue the potential scale and so we overvalue founding, undervalue scaling. It is always worth thinking really hard about whether you will be able to build a great company or whether you might be better off joining another company that is doing something truly great.

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.

I am in a state of excessive indignation about everything, from which I deduce old age and hardening of the arteries

--- Isaiah Berlin, letter to Mary McCarthy in 1964 when he was aged fifty-five, quoted in "Learning a Lot About Isaiah Berlin" by John Banville, a review of Building: Letters 1960–1975 by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle

He who gives food, gives longevity, pleasant complexion, happiness, stamina and intelligence

--- Gotama Buddha, Bhojana Sutta, Panchaka Nipata, The Fives,  Anguttara Nikaya, cited in the liturgy (pdf) of Hunger No More: An Interfaith Convocation of Prayer and Commitment, June 5, 2005, Washington National Cathedral.

Quote as cited:

Monks, he who gives food, gives longevity, pleasant complexion, happiness,
stamina and intelligence.

The liturgy (pdf) includes a long list of "National Religious Leadership Statements on Hunger and Poverty," including this by Bhante M. Dhammasiri, President, Buddhist Vihara, Washington, DC:

Buddhism advocates generosity as one of the main virtues accumulated even by the potential
Buddha. Feeding poor people is one of the duties of a Buddhist. One who is capable of earning
more with ethical means shares his/her surplus with others. Food, clothing, shelter and medicine are four essentials that a person needs. Buddhism emphasizes the fact that everybody lives on food and that is the main requisite. The Buddhist generosity is culminated when one sacrifices his/her own life for the benefit of others. According to Buddhism, before asking the person to follow the teachings of the Buddha, one should check whether the person had enough to eat because the hungry cannot comprehend the essence of the teachings. The Buddha mentioned that hunger is the worst disease.

One possible source of the reference to not being hungry before receiving teaching may be the story cited in  Eat To Live, Not Live To Eat, in which the Buddha ensured that a poor man had been fed before starting his teaching, keeping many others waiting in the process.

The gods have become diseases

--- C G Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” Collected Works 13, para. 54, cited by  James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 161; see Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 13)  p. 37

Quote in context:

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer  rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. 

Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.

--- Philo of Alexandria, according to James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 231

Hollis's citation in context:

If we look hard enough, we will find anxiety, or its management, at the roots of so much we do. It is disconcerting to realize this fact, but in recognition of the ubiquity of anxiety in our lives and in those around us we may feel greater compassion for ourselves and for each other. Philo of Alexandria is reported to have said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.” If we can accept that about ourselves and each other, accept the normality of anxiety, seek the roots of identifiable fears in that anxiety, then simply do the best that we can and forgive the rest, we may at last become less anxious.

Quote Investigator contests the attribution to Philo (or, as often, to Plato).

Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past

--- E. T. Williams, Warden of Rhodes House, quoted by Stephen Bergman in his essay "Resistance and the Balliol Revolution: What we dare to do together", The American Oxonian, vol. 99, no. 4, Fall 2012, p. 287

Quote in context:

The Warden of Rhodes House, E. T. Williams, at morning "sherries" in his lair that laid you out wll into the afternoon, soon instilled in us the two rules of the American scholars' trajectory at Oxford. First: "Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past"; second: "you Americans spend your first year winding down, and your second year winding back up."

he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him

--- Adrian Searle, about Paul Klee, in Guardian review "Paul Klee at Tate Modern: More! More! More!", 14 October 2013

Quote in context:

I often feel, looking at Klee, that he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him. Working in a spirit both of rigorous formal enquiry and childlike impetuousness and spontaneity, he kept himself guessing as well as us.

Another wonderful passage caught Madelaine Maior's eye:

You need to sidle up to things, let your eye snag on a detail, get sucked in then turn away again, allowing yourself to look while your mind is elsewhere. Being inattentive is as important as close inspection. An art as generative and fecund as Klee's is particularly susceptible to this kind of looking. Just follow your eye.

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity

--- Chris Duckett, in a ZDNet story Mobile data continues growth, fixed line remains download king,  October 8, 2013

Quote in context:

For proponents of mobile data, the numbers in the latest Internet Activity report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) tell quite a story — over the 12 months until June 2013, the amount of data downloaded on mobile devices almost doubled. In the year from December 2011 to December 2012, the amount of data increased from 5,000TB to 13,703TB.

Taking these numbers on their own and trumpeting 12-month growth percentages of 169 percent, 174 percent, and 97 percent sounds mighty impressive. Without any sort of wider context, it's easy to see how the ill-informed could fantasise of a world where mobile data trumps existing infrastructure to become the primary and best way to deliver data to the masses.

...

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity, for only half the picture will often be revealed.

...

 Mobile data may be increasing at a rapid rate, but it is yet to reach one-fifth of the data downloaded on fixed lines in December 2009. By contrast, fixed-line downloads have grown by five and a half times since the end of 2009.

The plural of anecdote is (not?) data

--- Raymond Wolfinger, per email to Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, cited in David Smith, "The plural of anecdote is data, after all" (2011)

I [Shapiro] e-mailed Wolfinger last year and got the following response from him:

"I said 'The plural of anecdote is data' some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student's dismissal of a simple factual statement -- by another student or me -- as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby's accurate quotation and attribution in an article in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1993; I believe it was in the first issue of the year."

I was led to this quote by a remark of Martin Weiss during his paper presentation at TPRC 2013 on Saturday. It led me to riff during my paper presentation that inside the Beltway, the plural of anecdotes is truth.

Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty

--- Oxfam America, Introduction to the report, The politics of partnership: How donors manage risk while letting recipients lead their own development, December 2011

In context:

No amount of aid will “deliver” development. Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty. Aid is ultimately useful to the extent that recipient citizens and governments can use it effectively. Increased efforts by donors to maintain tight control over aid often end up making aid less useful to recipients, and the converse also is true. Genuine partnerships with people and their governments makes aid more effective over the long term. This reality is well known to donors and recipients alike, yet donors consistently find it politically difficult to trust recipients to share in the design and allocation of aid.

No one lies as much as the indignant do

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two, The free spirit, section 27, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 229

In context:

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the dis gust—namely, where by a freak of nature genius is tied to some such indiscreet billygoat and ape, as in the case of the Abbé Galiani, the profoundest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more taciturn. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape’s body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when anyone speaks “badly”— and not even “wickedly”—of man, the lover of knowledge should listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant and whoever perpetually tears and lacerates with his own teeth himself (or as a Substitute, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense they are a more ordinary, more in different, and less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant do.

Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, On the prejudices of the philosophers, section 9, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 205

Quote:

“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference it self as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living—estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

What you do matters. How you do it is important. Why you do it is critical.

--- Shivam Dhawan, from a slide deck on slideshare.net called D.I.Y. guide to personal branding, slide 59 of 73

If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing

--- Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, during a TEDx CERN Talk about how all research — real research, that is — is improbable.

See video at time code 2:15 onwards

All research is improbable. All research is going to turn up some things you really didn’t expect. If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing.

We don’t sit to get better. We sit to be with life as it is.

--- Seth Segall, closing line in the blog post, Good Sitting, Bad Sitting, November 23, 2012

From the post:

William and Matthew are at the start of their Zen journey. They’re beginning to learn that sitting isn’t about perfect concentration and bliss, but about seeing the mind as it is — a mirror that reflects everything — including the energies of holidays and far-off conflicts. Thoughts about these ongoing events rise and stir the emotions. The goal is not the elimination of these thoughts and emotions, but developing our capacity to observe them in a kind and interested way. If all that we can observe is how helplessly caught up we are in them — how our minds have a mind of their own — then that, in and of itself, is the beginning of wisdom. We are not the masters of our own house, and learning to work skillfully with the energies at play is the work of a lifetime.

 ...

Sitting is a strange process. In the beginning, it’s hard to grasp what it’s all about. Later on, it doesn’t get much easier. The only thing that’s clear is “just do it.” Whether the sitting is “good” or “bad,” just do it. You never get any better at it. Not really. But this whole idea of “getting better” is part of the problem, the endless self-improvement and self-manipulation game.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "Ethics"

A sobering thought for those of us with a sitting practice. The glass-half-full interpretation is that since we're all narcissistic, meditation offers a safe way to indulge this vice.

It is easier to fast than diet

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "The Sacred and the Profane"

In context:

One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be "slightly" kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.

The "slightly kosher" coda actually detracts from the aphorism; it's just a vanilla oxymoron, like "partly pregnant."