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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b72615f | Naturally society cherished itself alone; it prized what everyone agreed was precious, despised what everyone agreed was despicable, and ignored what no one mentioned-all to it's own enhancement, and with the loud view that these bubbles and vapors were eternal and universal. If June had stressed to Mabel that she was going to die, would she have learned to eat with a fork? Society's loyal members, having sacrificed their only lives to it's.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 1500199 | This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. | Annie Dillard | ||
| d8ff4b0 | Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever. | Annie Dillard (Author) | ||
| e8cf66d | What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. | science whale space | Annie Dillard | |
| 1c77801 | For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. .. | selfconsciousness awakening consciousness | Annie Dillard | |
| 2bd7f22 | Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing. | nature listening | Annie Dillard | |
| dd8b2b1 | The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21). | nature world philosophy sight | Annie Dillard | |
| 720bd18 | You can't test courage cautiously." (Annie Dillard)" | Marcia Quinn Noren | ||
| 95363d4 | Better to live your life open rather than exist on borrowed time, waiting for the great unmasking. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 8831a4e | It's easy to look back and think how we could make only the good things happen to us,' counseled Catherine, still swishing her mop to and fro, spreading dirty water instead of soaking it up. 'But that's not how we become ourselves. You are mad who you are by the bad stuff, the little things, as much as the great triumphs and big decisions. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 55afa62 | He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in w.. | heart love thunder misery voice | George MacDonald | |
| 598dc10 | I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my world. I wanted so badly to run away from my life. But you can't bury yourself in other people's pages and scenes. You aren't David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer. Those love songs on the radio might speak to you, but they're not about you or the person.. | life tv-shows novels movies | Jason Diamond | |
| 6738bd4 | Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| d424a1d | I'm not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 94a8395 | I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 1191df6 | But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease--the delight in being able to see how much you can do. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| c2e9155 | l ynbGy 'n nkhsh~ mn lshkW bl yjb 'n nrHWb bh wnnqshh | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| ec81ef8 | The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 5ea20f5 | What looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 3259662 | I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher --- a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. | educational-quotes | Richard Feynman | |
| 637725f | When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We _know_ all that!" "Oh," I say, "you _do?_ Then no _wonder_ I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 6c8feeb | The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: 'Yes, but there is no real materia.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 5207020 | I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 5de2705 | I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together a.. | thoughts | Richard P. Feynman | |
| 05b92ca | Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2164900 | I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York--and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more cou.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| eb6398f | as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The" | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3494add | As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my Dad. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6e70078 | Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 29dd66a | It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a r.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e8749d0 | Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant. The rest was just centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused- and it occurred to me, with t.. | sex history sleeping | Bill Bryson | |
| 2bb6e58 | Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could m.. | humor | Bill Bryson | |
| 222c215 | I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7416b70 | On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e568b9 | The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b222bc8 | FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don't like them. Reflex loathings, I call them. Mine are: Power walkers. Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready. Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages. All pigeons everywhere, at all times. Lawyers, too... | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e115bf | So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigured with sores, or above all deceased? A dead host, after all, is hardly going to provide long-term hospitality. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9fb888a | Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8fe0677 | Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most--99.99 percent--are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3c238f4 | I was particularly taken with an article about a pub called the White Post on Rimpton Hill on the Dorset-Somerset border. The county boundary runs right through the middle of the bar. In former times when Dorset and Somerset had different licensing laws, people had to move from one side of the room to the other at 10 pm in order to continue drinking legally until 10.30. I don't know why but this made me feel a pang of nostalgia for the way .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e20f397 | Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But--and here is the truly remarkable thing--because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn't get to it, so it took a very long time--forty years to be precise--to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedr.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0ea4de7 | The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bafbbcf | Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined PS10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month's hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunde.. | history trivia | Bill Bryson | |
| 714b4ac | Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer. | lobsters scarcity trivia | Bill Bryson |