I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned

 --- widely (but dubiously) attributed to Richard Feynman

Physical objects [are] comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer

Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 3rd Edition, Harvard University Press (1980), p.  44

Excerpt:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

Via Galen Strawson, in “Reply to Hocutt,” Philosophical Books (1996), where he wrote, “Materialism, after all, is a metaphysical hypothesis. As such it is, as Quine memorably observed, ‘comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer’.”

the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces

 --- David Simon, creator-writer-producer of HBO's The Wire, in an interview with Nick Hornby, The Believer, Aug 1, 2007, Issue 46

Excerpt

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

David Simon, from The Believer, Issue 46

 

... woke up and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know

 --- Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November (Moomins, 8), Ch. 5

The first paragraph of Chapter 5, "Hemulen":

The Hemulen woke up and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know. He felt even tireder than when he went to bed, and here it was—another day which would go on until evening and then there would be another one and another one which would be the same as all days are when they are lived by a Hemulen.

 

it is happening because it makes someone money, and will continuing happening until it stops making someone money

--- Bernard Welt on popular art, in Mythomania, Art Issues Press, 1998, p 7-8 

In context:

Maybe it is part of a general change in American culture that has been welcomed and deplored as a new age of faith, a giddy plunge into the irrational that runs across lines of party and sect, embracing the politics of compassion as well as stern but fuzzy family values, and New Age spirituality along with new-fashioned fundamentalism. It remains to be seen whether this is not an age of bad faith. But I know two things: First, it is happening because it makes someone money, and will continuing happening until it stops making someone money. (Christian evangelism didn't find television as a way of spreading its message; television found evangelism as a way of extending its market.) Second, it has something to do with the hypnotic trance we fell into around the time of Ronald Reagan's first televised address to the nation, when it first occurred to us that we had actually begun living in a movie. Raging neoconservatives or raving multiculturalists, we are still haunted by the Great White Father, and like it or not, we remain in the Age of Reagan until we are freed by the next great paradigm shift.

There was a wood rat called Poot

 --- Tove Jansson, in Comet in Moominland (Moomins, 2), Chapter 8 (h/t Susan T)

Excerpt

“Now we should tell a story,” said Sniff, turning to the smallest of the small creatures. “Do you know one, Little Creep?” 

“Oh, no, really,” whispered the Little Creep, who was terribly shy. “Oh, no, well, really, perhaps.” 

“Well, out with it, then,” said Sniff. 

“There was a wood rat called Poot,” said the Little Creep, looking shyly between her paws. 

“Well, what happened then?” prompted Sniff. 

“The story’s finished now,” said the Little Creep, and burrowed into the moss in confusion. 

They all roared with laughter, and those who had tails beat them on the ground in appreciation. 

 

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines

 --- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four: Maxims and Intentions, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics (Rev Ed) 2003

p. 99, paragraph 130 (complete)

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines – when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also finery; finery is also a hiding place.

Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite

 --- Matt Taibbi, "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo," Jun 30, 2021

In context:

. . . You wonder: Am I high? Didn’t I just read that? And didn’t I read that in the last book also? 

You did, because the rule, “If you wrote it, don’t write it again,” has an exception: “Unless it makes money, in which case write it as many times as the market will bear.” Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite. DiAngelo is monetizing white guilt on a grand scale, and there’s an extraordinary irony in the fact that she’s got a home-field advantage in this game over someone like, say, Ibram Kendi, because she’s more accessible to people like herself, the same phenomenon she decries. Normally I’d salute the capitalist ingenuity. Unfortunately, like Donald Trump, DiAngelo is both too dim-witted and too terrific an entrepreneur to stop herself from upselling a truly psychotic movement into existence. 

It's a high-octane rant; much more like this in the piece.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced

 --- Attrib. to James Baldwin

capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety

 --- Celso Vieira,  in "The capricious gods counterattack: on what the empirical method and the rational gods model miss" Academia Letters, 2021

From the Conclusion

According to the big gods hypothesis, moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions play a key role in reinforcing human cooperation. Hence, a religion with a big god is instrumental in the development of complex societies. This hypothesis has been questioned recently. . . . Factors such as wars and accessibility of resources seem to bear a closer connection with rising and falling complex societies. Wars and drastic resource depletion follow heavy-tailed distributions, that is, a body of events in which rare outliers are big enough to distort the mean of the whole. . . .

Regularity-centred models will not work to make predictions or estimates. The advised way to deal with a potential catastrophic event is a zero-risk attitude. However, it is not easy to advocate for it. Heavy events are rare, so people are expected to adopt self-constraining behaviour based on unavailable observed evidence. To make the perils more vivid, older generations who experienced heavy events might want to find a way to convey this information for the generations to come. Storytelling might work. Again, because of the rarity, no foreseeable gratification for the self-constraining behaviour is available. If so, piety, that is, prudence plus a humbling recognition of uncertainty might reinforce the right attitude. According to the previous discussion, capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety. Thus, capriciousness might be a side of religiosity playing a non-negligible role in the avoidance of catastrophes by long-lasting societies.

There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.

 --- Alec Ryrie, closing of his Gresham College lecture "Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich," March 2017.

Closing comments, starting at timecode 51:49:

We might imagine or hope that had we been there, we would've done something or taken some stand, and we are fooling ourselves. We would've understood what was happening around us, in the same way that they did. We would've shared their hopes, their experiences, their resentments, their assumptions, and their prejudices. Like them, we would've lowered our heads and muddled through increasingly terrible times as best we could. There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.

When the ducks quack, feed ‘em

 --- Wall Street proverb, via Jason Zweig, "Should You Be Buying What Robinhood Is Selling?," Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2021

Excerpt

One of Wall Street’s oldest and frankest sayings is “When the ducks quack, feed ‘em”—meaning that whenever investors are eager to buy something, brokers will sell it like mad.

The intelligence can only be led by desire. . . . The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy.

 --- Simone Weil, quoted by Toril Moi in "I came with a sword," an LRB review of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, by Robert Zaretsky

From Moi's piece: 

Zaretsky rightly devotes a chapter to Weil’s ideas on attention. For her, attention is not focused, tense concentration. It has nothing to do with willpower. Attention is attente – a waiting, a letting go, an unselfish opening. To struggle with a problem in geometry is valuable whether or not we manage to solve it, because it teaches us to be open to God and therefore to others. The ‘love of God’, she writes

    has attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour ... is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.

The point of studying is not to learn this or that, but to acquire this discipline of the soul. Weil argues that we can train our attention by doing geometry, Greek and Latin translation and by writing, if we are willing to wait for the right word to come. ‘The intelligence,’ Weil writes in a passage I particularly love, ‘can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.’ Weil’s method is hardly a way to get straight As, for if there is no joy, there should be no work. As always, she practised what she preached. She failed the entrance exams to the École Normale the first time she tried, because she disliked her history teacher and so never turned up for his classes.

I believe the quote is from "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." Here is a reprint (pdf); see there for source and translator.

All tragedies are finish'd by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage

 --- Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Third (h/t Diane Sieber)

Excerpt

All tragedies are finish'd by a death,

  All comedies are ended by a marriage;

The future states of both are left to faith,

   For authors fear description might disparage

The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,

   And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;

So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,

   They say no more of Death or of the Lady.

Celebrity is cyclical and responds to what the overarching culture wants at any given time

 --- Jorie Lagerwey, quoted in "Famous for good reason? Britain elevates do-gooders to celebrities," Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2021

In context

The rise of Dr. Bodalia and Dr. Okorocha, who have a combined following of more than 85,000 on Instagram alone, reveals a shift in who, and what, constitutes celebrity in the eyes of Britons during the pandemic. At a time when the U.K. records one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from COVID-19, the country has been granting iconic status to those who serve communities, do public good, and raise awareness for social causes.

“Celebrity is cyclical and responds to what the overarching culture wants at any given time,” says Jorie Lagerway [sic], associate professor in television studies at the University of Dublin. “The reason we have celebrities is to tell us what’s important in our culture at that particular moment in history.”

Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it

 --- Margaret Heffernan, perhaps in The Myth of Inevitability, BBC audio, Oct 2019, via LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience

 --- David E Nye, quoted by LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Context via Sacasas

Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities . . . Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

 --- Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, according to goodreads

gossip, cherry-picked facts and baseless speculation—America’s second, third and fourth favorite past times [sic]

 --- Jason Gay, in "Why the NFL Draft Is Unstoppable, Even Now," WSJ, April 27, 2021

In context:

Get it right, get it wrong, the draft is a huge deal, really an optimal event for these times, a windy feast of gossip, cherry-picked facts and baseless speculation—America’s second, third and fourth favorite past times, after screaming at each other on social media about pandemic face masks. In the information-is-everywhere era, the draft has turned marvelously democratic: You don’t need to be decked in Brioni on TV to have a sizzling, or even smarter, take on BYU quarterback Zach Wilson, Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields, or the current, allegedly-surging quarterback darling, Trey Lance of North Dakota State. You don’t have to be able to finish a 40-yard dash to have profound wisdom on the proper 40-yard dash time for an NFL player. All you need is access to a computer. And a mouth.

he lives well who lives unseen

 --- Descartes, according to Michael Allen Gillespie in The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008, 183)

Gillespie excerpt:

Why did Descartes leave Paris and hide himself away from the public eye? He himself gives us a preliminary answer to this question with his famous assertion that “he lives well who lives unseen.” This humanist claim, however, does not capture the truth of the matter, for Descartes did not really retreat from society. In fact, he moved around a great deal, spending considerable time in Amsterdam, which he called his “urban solitude,” and in a number of smaller towns. It was not therefore a bucolic, Petrarchian solitude that Descartes was seeking. It is more likely that he wanted to find a place he could work and publish more freely and without fear of retaliation. On May 5, 1632, he wrote a paean on Holland to his friend, the poet Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac: “What other land [is there] where one can enjoy a liberty so entire, where one can sleep with less inquietude, where there are always armies afoot expressly to guard you, where poisonings, treason, calumnies are less known, and where the innocence of former times remains?” It is important to remember that he had already been accused of Rosicrucianism. His fears on this score were not misplaced, as the actions taken against a number of the libertines indicate. Already in the Little Notebook, he had recognized the need to conceal his true features and during his years in Holland he went to great lengths to develop and perfect this mask. In fact, Descartes assiduously cultivated the appearance of orthodoxy, although it is clear that at least theologically he had adopted heterodox positions from very early on.

Future events such as these will affect you in the future

 --- Criswell, in Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed D Wood Jr.

Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apnH01sf0I&ab_channel=JWood

Not my circus, not my monkeys

 --- Polish proverb "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy," according to the Polish and Proud blog, April 2019

From the blog:

In short, it could be translated as having the same meaning of "I mind my own business" or "it’s none of my business", but in a broader sense, it’s usually used to enhance the fact that you are not the one to judge someone else’s actions, even when you don’t necessarily agree with them. As if the mess someone else has found himself in, is not your mess to worry about, and the people taking part in that mess are not the ones you can control. 

The research shows that this proverb is not actually an old one. This is interesting because most used usually have a long history and a meaning behind them. It is noted by Henryk Markiewicz and Andrzej Romanowski in Skrzydlate słowa: wielki słownik cytatów polskich i obcych from 2005, that the proverb has been first used in 1993, when Ireneusz Sekula commented the governing of Hanna Suchocka.

They could fight, or they could gamble

 --- Canadian Museum of History archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki, about game pieces found at a Native American archaeological site, in "Walking Into New Worlds," Archaeology, Sep/Oct 2020

In context:

In addition to the moccasins, the team unearthed more bison bones, hide scrapers, sewing awls, small beads, and fragments of woven mats and baskets. Perhaps the most significant group of artifacts they excavated is a large collection of gaming pieces. This evidence of gambling is particularly telling, says Canadian Museum of History archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki. “These games weren’t just recreational pastimes,” he says. They were a proxy for communication, indicating that contact between groups was taking place. Native elders have explained that when two groups speaking different languages and from different cultures encountered each other, they had a choice: “They could fight,” Yanicki says, “or they could gamble.”

Magic without magic

 --- John Wheeler, via a Nautilus animation of comments by Robbert Dijkgraaf

From an obituary, "Magic without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)" by @curiouswavefn

Only Wheeler could have introduced paradoxical and yet meaningful phrases like "mass without mass". In celebration of his sixtieth birthday, physicists produced a volume dedicated to him with a title that appropriately captured the essence of his thinking- "magic without magic". 

The 1972 festschrift: Magic without magic: John Archibald Wheeler;: A collection of essays in honor of his sixtieth birthday (amazon).

although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things

 --- Miri Rubin, on the BBC In Our Time episode Medieval Pilgrimage, at timecode 11:00

In context - responding to a question from Melvyn Bragg about the role of relics, and the power associated with them

From very early on, the very idea of a sacrament means that deep in Christianity is the belief that although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things.

the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized

 --- Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007), p. 126

In context: 

With the Cold War no longer available, it was necessary to reframe pretexts not only for intervention but also for militarized state capitalism at home. The Pentagon budget presented to Congress a few months after the fall Of the Berlin Wall remained largely unchanged, but was packaged in a new rhetorical framework, presented in the National Security Strategy of March 1990. One priority was to sup- port advanced industry in traditional ways, in sharp violation of the free market doctrines proclaimed and imposed on others. The National Security Strategy called for strengthening "the defense industrial base" (essentially, high-tech industry) with incentives "to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development." As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized, a form of state socialism for the rich on which much of the advanced US economy relies, particularly since World War Il, but with precedents in the advanced economies back to the early days of the industrial revolution." In the past several decades, Pentagon funding for research and development has declined, while support through the National Institutes of Health and other "health-related" components of the state sector has increased, as the cutting edge of the economy of the future shifts from electronics- to biology-based industry. The longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and other ideologues may hail the wonders of "entrepreneurial initiative," "consumer choice," and "free trade," but those who channel public funds to development of the economy and those who profit from these decisions know better.

Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature

 --- Kermit Pattison, in Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind Hardcover (2020, p. 360), via Stephanie Hanes's review in the CS Monitor, December 2020.

In context

The Royal Society conference began to expose the battle lines around the oldest family skeleton. Those guided by genetics and primatology used living apes to make logical inferences about our common ancestors. ("I have no more direct access to the last common ancestor than anyone else in this room," McGrew explained to the audience. "So we have to model. We're forced to do so.") In contrast, those guided by fossils took a ground-up approach— bones revealed what really happened. Those two mind-sets placed faith in different lines of evidence, made different assumptions, and inevitably reached different conclusions. In the first approach, the relationships between humans and apes were irrefutable, but the form of their common ancestors remained conjectural. In the fossil-based method, bones provided rock-hard evidence of past forms, but their places in the family and relationships to humans could only be surmised. Both sides fought to make their work relevant to human origins—and Ardi [a 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton, short for Ardipithecus ramidus] became the flashpoint. 

In short, it was a classic clash of scientific worldviews. Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature. In his 1962 milestone The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of the scientific paradigm—the set of theories and methods that …

Another excerpt the Stephanie Hanes points to, on p. 399-400

One of Ardi 's main lessons is that the simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science. The most enduring work is that which describes things never seen before—human anatomy, fossils of extinct animals, ape behaviors, genetic code, ancient ecosystems, and more—without distorting that novelty to conform to the expectations of the era. But we humans hunger for more than just pure description—we search for meaning and emotionally satisfying endings, and that's when we run astray, because our reach for narrative often exceeds our grasp of facts. In the struggle to comprehend the unfamiliar, we invoke familiar analogies, but nature usually turns out to be more complex than what we imagine in our little brains. The only way to know for sure is to discover.

 

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no"

 --- Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, writing in 2009, referring to a much older concept; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Betteridge, from TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism, archived 

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

See the Wikipedia article for earlier mentions, including Hinchliffe's Rule.

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces

 --- ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (e.g. Goodreads); haven't tracked down the source

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought

 --- Samuel Palmer, British landscape painter, etcher, and printmaker, via the Ashmolean Museum Instagram feed, 27 Jan 2021

A self-portrait of Palmer in the Ashmolean
that was painted when he was nineteen

For more quotes by Palmer, see AZ Quotes

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler

 --- Tony Stark, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); the archetypal tech entrepreneur on his relationship to leadership (archetypally, the Ruler)

From https://www.quotes.net/mquote/974240 

Maria Hill:

All set up boss.

Tony Stark:

Actually he's the boss.

[points to Captain America]

Tony Stark:

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler.

Serial faileur

 --- Pierre de Vries, Blogger "About Me" statement until Jan 7, 2021

Full description

Serial faileur. Not good enough at particle physics; quit venture capital; dropped out of art school; left the software industry; got bored with technology policy. Currently thinking about high tech and myth.

potency as a source of meaning and [a] potential for zealotry are naturally correlated

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), p. 177

Quote in context: after citing critiques by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and David French in the National Review:

Yet social justice's most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated. Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.

Cui bono?

 --- attributed to Lucius Cassius by Cicero, according to Wikipedia:

L. Cassius ille, quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat, identidem in causis quaerere solebat, cui bono fuisset?

Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: "to whom might it be for a benefit?"

—Cicero: Pro Roscio Amerino, §§ 84, 86 

Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

 --- John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, on 22 December 1817, as cited by a Wikipedia article (accessed 12/29/2020):

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Keats, John (1899). The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. p. 277. ISBN 978-1-146-96754-9.

Be pitiful [i.e. kind], for every man is fighting a hard battle

 --- John Watson aka Ian MacLaren, according impressive sleuthing by Quote Investigator, June 2010.

From the Quote Investigator article, which traced it back to the late 19th century (and not to Plato or Philo of Alexandria):

Another citation in 1898 provides the name of a publication in Britain that published the message of MacLaren. The name “MacLaren is spelled “Maclaren” in this cite also [CM]:

“Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle,” was the tender Christmas message sent by Ian Maclaren to the readers of The British Weekly.

An extended discussion of the theme of the aphorism is present in a book published under MacLaren’s real name John Watson in 1903. The book section is titled “Courtesy” [HV]:

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.

(The  abbreviations in square brackets are references in the article.)

More recent versions reflect contemporary language preferences, e.g. this from the Seattle Times in 1984:

“Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden.”

Reading enriches the mind, conversation makes it nimble, and writing makes it precise

 --- Francis Bacon, as paraphrased by Paul Diduch in "Culture Wars in Rome" course description, May 2019 (pdf); the original in "Of Studies" is "reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

From The Essays of Counsels, Civil and Moral: 

Of Studies

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt. 

It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless

 --- Martin Luther King Jr., address at Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963

Excerpt

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you've got to change the heart and you can't change the heart through legislation. You can't legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion.

Well, there's half‐truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart.

But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. [APPLAUSE]

So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.  

Boeke en lees versit tentpenne in die kop

 --- Clinton V du Plessis, by tydpunt 12:55 in 'n RSG Skatkis-program "Voetsoldaat van die vers", 'n program oor hom, via Taaldinge potgooi 24 Mei 2020.

Everyone is a fan of free speech until they have some users

 --- Benedict Evans, quoted in a CS Monitor explainer, ‘Free speech social media’? Three questions about Parler, Nov 2020

Excerpt

Q: Can you really post anything? 

No. The company says they follow the Federal Communications Commission’s guidelines on violent or obscene speech. In a post on Parler, Mr. Matze outlined the “very few basic rules”: No pornography, no death threats, and, he wrote, no “posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section.”

Parler claims to give users the power to moderate their feeds but experts point out that it more or less operates like a regular social media company. Parler makes it clear in the user agreement it retains the right to terminate an account or remove content for any reason. While debunked claims about voter fraud and QAnon theories are flourishing unchecked, and white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas are not hard to find, some liberal users have reported being banned from the site after criticizing the company’s legal practices.

Benedict Evans, an independent tech analyst, says crackdowns are expected on any growing platform. “Everyone is a fan of free speech until they have some users,” he says.

The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine

 --- widely ascribed to Charles H. Townes; h/t Matt Ridley, on the EconTalk podcast, Aug 31, 2020

From the podcast transcript:

Matt Ridley: Yes. And the way I distinguish [invention and innovation] is that when a new device is invented, it also has to be made available, affordable, and reliable, and that process is innovation. And it's often much harder work than the original invention. Coming up with the first prototype is sometimes the easy bit. Turning it into something that people want and people can afford, and that people can get ahold of is really tough work.

There's a lovely story that Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser, used to tell, which rather nicely illustrates the difference between invention and innovation. He said, there's a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam and the beaver says to the rabbit, 'No, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine.'

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 --- William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

Via Wikipedia

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle!

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Belonging is stronger than facts

 --- Zeynep Tufekci, in "How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump," MIT Technology Review, August 2018 (via L M Sacasas, "Narrative Collapse: An Addendum")

From the piece

While algorithms will often feed people some of what they already want to hear, research shows that we probably encounter a wider variety of opinions online than we do offline, or than we did before the advent of digital tools. Rather, the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts.

people scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy

 --- A. P. Burnett's blurb writer, quoted by Richard Rutherford in his General Introduction to Medea and Other Plays: Medea/ Alcestis/The Children of Heracles/ Hippolytus (2003), Penguin Classics. 

Here's Rutherford (text at Erenow.com)

The Iphigenia at Aulis is a fast-moving and constantly attention-grabbing play, but one in which the high seriousness of the Aeschylean ode is dissipated, and the tragic sacrifice becomes wasteful self- deception. As A. P. Burnett put it: ‘In these plays the poet shows men scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy.’ 

The source is given in the accompanying footnote as, "From the jacket blurb of Catastrophe Survived (Oxford 1977)." The text from Google Books, for the 1985 edition, is:

Examining the seven Euripidean tragicomedies, this book contends that the plays' plots--compounded as they are of the opposite elements of good fortune and catastrophe--result from experimentation with a new form intended to express a characteristically Euripidean view of reality. The plays involve people scaled for comedy trying to live in a world ruled by the gods of tragedy, making efforts sometimes noble, sometimes sordid, but in the end, essentially futile. Burnett shows how Euripides manipulates traditional scenes, diverting and frustrating the expectations aroused in his audience and transforming their simple pity and terror into a response that is conscious, complex, and inescapably disturbing.

一山还有一山高

 --- Chinese saying (Google Translate)

Via ShinikenHarui in the comment section of the TwoSetViolin episode World Class Prodigy Violinist Chloe Chua Gives TwoSet a Violin Lesson, Sep 2020, translated as "there's always another mountain taller".

For a few more translations, see a page on Baidu ("天外有天，一山还比一山高" 的英语翻译). The full saying seems to be "天外有天，一山还比一山高”, "There is a sky outside the sky, and a mountain is higher than a mountain" (according to Google Translate)

Old men ought to be explorers

 --- T.S. Eliot, from East Coker, second of the Four Quartets

The last stanza:

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst

 --- Thomas Hardy, in In Tenebris - II.

The fourth and final stanza

Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here. 

For just this poem, pulled from the compendium given above, see here.

My favourite results were those that didn’t quite look like something I’d made, yet felt like something I meant

 --- Gaby Wood, in LRB Podcast Gaby Wood: How to Draw an Albatross, June 16, 2020, a reading of her piece "Diary," London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 12 · 18 June 2020

In describing her attempts to use a camera lucida:

The drawings were semi-conscious, made at great speed in order to record an illusion, the way you might wake up and try to write down what had happened in a dream. My favourite results were those that didn’t quite look like something I’d made, yet felt like something I meant.

Another nice quote comes from her description of etching practice

As a novice etcher, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about ‘states’. Although I’d seen references to an etching’s state – ‘second state of four’, ‘fifth state’ and so on – I hadn’t really taken in what it meant. When you make an etching you tend to work on it in layers, and often over a long period. Painters do that too, but when you’re etching the only way to see the result is to print it (apart from anything else, the print is backwards in relation to the plate). The finished plate, which can be used for hundreds of near identical prints, will have produced printed records of its younger selves, or ‘states’. Of course, you don’t have to call your early trials ‘states’ – you could just call them rubbish and throw them in the bin. But artists often make editions of different states, and collectors might acquire several of them. There’s an acknowledgment, when dealing with this medium, that one image is haunted by its ancestors or alternates.

Here's the image of the albatross from the LRB piece

we're aestheticizing our own destruction

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, in conversation with Richard Aldous about her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, The American Interest podcast June 2020.

From timecode 19:56

There's a phenomenon I've seen since Trump was elected, but also anytime something bad or surreal happens in the news, the sort-of Twitter meme becomes, "Well, this season of America is terrible, this season of America has jumped the shark, can you believe the writers added this plot twist?" And it's a joke, but I think it reveals something very real, which is the sense of, you know, we're aestheticizing our own destruction, as Walter Benjamin might say.

According to Wikipedia, Benjamin said that "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate. Benjamin said, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), ch.XIX/Epilogue:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (...) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (...) Communism responds by politicizing art.

At 3:38, Richard Aldous notes that she sums up the key elements of religion as meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.

a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. ... AI is ... our id writ large

 --- Elon Musk, on JoeRogan Experience #1169,  

Time code 00:14:52

JR: How far away are we from something that's really truly sentient?

EM: Well, I mean, you could argue that any group of people, like a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. That's what a company is. And then, there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed. And then, there's a sort of like a collective AI in the Google, sort of, Search, Google Search, you know, where we're all sort of plugged in as like nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree. And we're all feeding this network with our questions and answers. We're all collectively programming the AI. And Google, plus all the humans that connect to it, are one giant cybernetic collective. This is also true of Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and all the social networks. They're giant cybernetic collectives.

Time code 00:17:18

EM: But the AI is informed strangely by the human limbic system. It is, in large part, our id writ large.

JR: How so?

EM: We mentioned all those things, the sort of primal drives. There's all of the things that we like, and hate, and fear. They're all there on the internet. They're a projection of our limbic system. That's true.

JR: No, it makes sense. And the thinking of it as a -- I mean, thinking of corporations, and just thinking of just human beings communicating online through these social media networks in some sort of an organism that's a -- It's a cyborg. It's a combination. It's a combination of electronics and biology.

EM: Yeah. This is -- In some measure, like, it's to the success of these online systems. It's sort of a function of how much limbic resonance they're able to achieve with people. The more limbic resonance, the more engagement.

JR: Whereas, like one of the reasons why probably Instagram is more enticing than Twitter.

EM: Limbic resonance.