2017

  • The intellect is too crude of a net to catch the whole. — Christopher Alexander
  • How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
  • I guess that the source of all suffering is a sense of separation between you and everything else. That separation is always fictitious but that fiction is always very powerful. Sometimes, you kneel before it. It is a fiction, though, and it has to be dissolved like all other fictions. — Leonard Cohen, Having Lunch With Leonard Cohen, Sabotage Times
  • If you want to make people feel joyous in their existence, you need to create a sense that all life is something of which curiosity was the key that opened it. — Tim Smit, Tim Smit Created Eden, Dumbo Feather
  • Dare to be as big as you can afford to be. And then be even bigger than that. Be bigger than you can afford to be. — Tim Smit, Tim Smit Created Eden, Dumbo Feather
  • We make mistakes all the time, but we're trying. We try to organize ourselves in different ways so that the hierarchies aren't rigid pyramids, they're more like bands of people hunting in packs. We show people that if you get together and start on a journey, lots of other people will join you. I think it's exactly that territory which we middle class, liberal, educated people missed: we want for ourselves and our children something which we're not prepared to actually fight for. It sounds as if that's a socialist polemic, It's not It's actually just about doing the right thing. — Tim Smit, Tim Smit Created Eden, Dumbo Feather
  • I actually feel that what we've got is what we deserve. It's actually our fault. That is people like me—liberal-thinking people who've got smug about the world—we all got a lot of very sloppy emotionally-driven ideas about what society was. We preferred to sit around coffee tables talking about it than actually make it happen. — Tim Smit, Tim Smit Created Eden, Dumbo Feather
  • People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. — Ray Bradbury
  • A student asked, “When times of great difficulty visit us, how should we meet them?”
    The teacher said, “Welcome.” — Zen Koan, via John Tarrant, How to Welcome the End of the World
  • You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding. — Terence McKenna
  • There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. — Marshall McLuhan
  • Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches best. — Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island
  • Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own. — Bruce Lee, Wisdom for the Way
  • Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. ― Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man
  • Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. — Leopold Kohr
  • A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. — Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
  • Action causes more trouble than thought. — Jenny Holzer
  • What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? — Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
  • We don't live off money, we live off pleasure, and pleasure as consumption is a superficial pleasure. But when it comes from the fulfilment of your specific function, from being a cherished element where you live, that pleasure is deep and healthy. — Ernst Götsch in Neste Chão Tudo Dá (On this Ground Everything Grows)
  • If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. — Confucius
  • All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end. — Henry David Thoreau
  • Sometimes, when the chaos burns like wildfires around us: we have no other choice but to fall in love with the warmth. — Christopher Poindexter
  • We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary — or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro and incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning? — Henry Miller, The World of Sex
  • In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again. ― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
  • You cannot develop a personality with physics alone, the rest of life must be worked in. — Richard Feynman
  • Chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. [..] Go after what creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. — Kelly McGonigal, How to Make Stress Your Friend
  • I have worked with thousands of people, from illiterate farmers to PhDs, and have never seen ignorance block learning. The only things that block learning are what we already know and our pride. — Allan Savory, Letters to a Young Farmer
  • Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich. — Sarah Bernhardt
  • If you haven't designed your life, somebody else has designed it for you. — Javan Kerby Bernakevitch, The Biggest Question
  • Building a temple requires the effort of many people. Craftsmen have habits and idiosyncrasies just as wood does, and in order to build a unified team that works with one mind it is essential to recognize each carpenter’s individual tendencies and assign tasks that utilize them to best advantage. Not only is it impossible to make each worker identical in ability, it is undesirable. — Azby Brown, The Genius of Japanese Carpentry
  • The job of a science fiction writer is to notice the car and the movie theater and anticipate the drive-in – and then go on to predict the sexual revolution. — Gardner Dozois, via Cory Doctorow in Cold Equations and Moral Hazard
  • The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. — Alberto Brandolini
  • Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end. — Woody Allen
  • I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts. — Wendell Berry, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine
  • Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
    — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
  • And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. — Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
  • … a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one. — Irving Blitzer, Cool Runnings
  • The third question is, we understand that agriculture narrowed our diet and damaged our health, but could it also have made us stupider and less interesting as well? — James C. Scott, Futures
  • The history of the peasantry is written by the townsman; the history of the nomads is written by the settled; the history of the hunter gatherer is written by the farmer; the history of the non-state peoples is written by the court scribe. All may be found in the archives cataloged under “barbarian histories”. — Anonymous, via James C. Scott
  • [For 3 million years the tribal life] worked for people the way nests worked for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles. That doesn’t make it loveable, it makes it viable — Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
  • The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. — Bob Samples, (often misattributed to Albert Einstein)
  • The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see. ― Alexandra K. Trenfor
  • When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. ― Dalai Lama XIV
  • A crank is a very elegant device. It’s small, it’s strong, it’s lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions. — E.F. Schumacher, via Paul Kingsnorth
  • To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing. — Raymond Williams
  • And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial. — Wendell Berry, Interview with Bill Moyers
  • I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own. — Andy Warhol
  • Retreat to the desert, and fight. — DH. Lawrence
  • The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. — Albert Camus
  • The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. — Wendell Berry

2014 by adam shand. sharing is an act of love, please share.