Nick Luft's Web Site
Food-for-Thought
Some quotes and ideas that I want to keep.
Updated: 5 March 2010
Acceptance
Be yourself. You will not understand this bit of advice until you understand yourself. Give it 20 years or so. Maybe more. I didn’t get this one until I fell in love and someone was there to tell me that my tendencies were OK and not annoying. Love is really acceptance at its core.
Observations
"The 'Truth' is equal to one's initial observations plus the corrections discovered through added experience or knowledge"
R B Buckner, "Surveying measurements and their analysis"
Diagram: "The Truth is equal to one's initial observations".
Passion, Drama and Love
"I had imagined that passion, drama, and love were all one and the same - proof that the others existed. But the opposite was true: drama and passion are just very clever disguises for a love that has never taken root."
Kathleen Tessaro, "Elegance: True love never goes out of fashion." BCA, 2003. (p.83-84)
Inner Character
"When you begin working on a role, you test out approaches; some may work better than others, some may not work at all. Then, one day, the external attitude -- an outwardly worked-out technical attitude -- suddenly leads you to the inner attitude, the inner situation, the inner pattern of behavior of the entire character. The same thing can happen the other way around, when through an inner drive you jump into the character all at once and the external expression is determined instantly by your inner being. But a technical attitude always leads to a spiritual change; as a technical as you may be about it, it has an effect on you. You conduct yourself differently, your inner bearing is suddenly another - and whether you can ever shed it completely, I don't know."
Kenneth Jacobson, "Embattled Selves: An investigation into the nature of identity through oral histories of holocaust survivors.", 1994.
Learned Men
"From all I hear of Leibniz he must be very intelligent, and pleasant company in consequence. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour."
Liselotte in a letter to Sophie, 30 July 1705. Quoted in "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson.
Fluid of Fertility
"No miser with his hoard of gold can feel the pleasure which comes to Esme and me as we stroll now through our doubled flock. The farm has given birth, and we identify ourselves with its labour. We have shared many of the pangs. There is no greed in our eyes as we survey the teeming land; rather are we humbled before the courage, persistence, and simplicity of nature. We have been privileged, for the gods have performed before us the great play of life. A gigantic orgasm has been succeeded by a gigantic birth. The fluid of fertility has been poured over the hills and valleys by firm hands whose generosity shames humanity. We feel that we have assisted at a miracle. And, of course, we have."
Thomas Firbank, "I Bought a Mountain", 1940.
Wikipedia entry on Thomas Firbank
Recursive Observation
"Our robot fly has materialized into a world where it so happens that the first group of inhabitants we come across is studying another world they have discovered - a world in which the inhabitants they watch are studying a report they have obtained from another world."
Brian W Aldiss, Report from Probability A
Struggling Pig - Lord of the Flies
"He noticed Ralph's scarred nakedness, and the sombre silence of all four of them. He sought, charitable in his happiness, to include them in the thing that had happened. His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
He spread his arms wide.
'You should have seen the blood!' "
William Golding. Lord of the Flies
Two Worlds - Lord of the Flies
"There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhiliration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense."
William Golding. Lord of the Flies
Endless Cycles
"Up to then he had gone forward through the heedless season of early youth - along a road which to children seems infinite, where the years slip past slowly and with quiet pace so that no one notices them go. We walk along calmly, looking curiously around us; there is not the least need to hurry, no one pushes us on from behind and no one is waiting for us; our comrades, too, walk on thoughtlessly, and often stop to joke and play. From the houses, in the doorways, the grown-up people greet us kindly and point to the horizon with an understanding smile. And so the heart begins to beat with desires at once heroic and tender, we feel that we are on the threshold of the wonders awaiting us further on. As yet we do not see them, that is true - but it is certain, absolutely certain that one day we shall reach them."
The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati. Edinburgh: Canongate. 2007 p.51
Endless Cycles
"The contractions of the adiabatic clouds were the expression of this periodicity, of the cyclic nature of time, in the same way the seasons are. Cycles, endless cycles. Everything moved and nothing changed. This thought made Carmichael euphoric: What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter. "
The Theory of Clouds, Stephane Audeguy
Umberto Eco's Anti-Library
"The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means... allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary"
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Earth is Truly Beautiful
"As he sat there beside that young woman who seemed so beautiful at daybreak, soothed and enchanted at the sight of those magical surroundings - sea, mountains, clouds, wide skies - Gurov reflected that, if one thought hard about it, everything on earth was truly beautiful except those things we ourselves think of and do when we forget the higher aims of existence and our human dignity."
The Lady with the Little Dog, Anton Chekov
Trivial Nonsense
"What meaningless nights, what dismal, unmemorable days! Frenetic card games, gluttony, constant conversations about the same old thing. Those pointless business affairs and perpetual conversations - always on the same theme - were commandeering the best part of his time, his best strength, so that in the end there remained only a limited, humdrum life, just trivial nonsense."
The Lady with the Little Dog, Anton Chekov
Getting Noticing
"... if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and no one to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?"
Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk, Vintage, 2003, p.152
Finishing Something
"Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished."
Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk, Vintage, 2003, p.150
Brief Squabbles
"...the little life she lured him back to with the good sense of a woman who doesn't believe in the other worlds, who knows there is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredoms and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise."
Man in the Dark, Paul Auster, Faber & Faber, 2008, p.97
Rotten Acts
"...there's something naive and fragile about her, and I wish to God she would learn that the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations - they're an essential part of who we are."
Man in the Dark, Paul Auster, Faber & Faber, 2008, p.46
Listless Playthings of Enormous Forces
"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Robots with Halitosis
[The book] "was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. ... [The book] predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race."
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
A Writer and his Public
"Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed, or on sale. 'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and making love to the world.' "
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Too Many Words
"There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey, 1951
Historians
"A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn't write history. He writes novels, or becomes an alienist, or a magistrate... A man who understands about people hasn't any yen to write history. History is toy soldiers."
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey, 1951
Absence of Trust
"In the absence of trust the pursuit of myopic self interest is the only
strategy that makes sense."
This, rather than Sveiby's "trust is the bandwidth of communication", explains why knowledge sharing initiatives are a waste of time and money in (most) enterprises where there is a culture of mistrust.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. James Surowiecki - quoted by Frank Ryan on km4dev
Expertise
"Electronic searching means that no relevant paper is likely to go unread, but narrowing the definition of 'relevance' risks reducing the cross-fertilisation of ideas that sometimes leads to big, unexpected advances. As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating."
Great minds think (too much) alike The Economist, 31 July 2008, p.82
Blaming others
"...she found herself without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate."
Tomasi di Lampedusa "The Leopard", Vintage 2007, p.208
Friendship
"Whatever the truth may be about love, there is certainly such a thing as friendship at first sight. They liked each other's voices, they liked each other's way of smiling and speaking."
H G Wells "The History of Mr Polly", Penguin 1946. p185
Talking
"The death of Socrates was too much for the herbalist; he had given up and was fast asleep. Father Pirrone noticed this and was pleased, for now he would be able to talk freely without fear of being misunderstood; and he felt a need of talking, so as to fix into a pattern of phrases some ideas obscurely milling in his head."
Tomasi di Lampedusa "The Leopard", Vintage 2007. p.150
Perfection
A definition of perfection is that it has no opposite. There is imperfection, but this is merely the absence of perfection.
Perfection is, to my mind, unobtainable. It is an ideal dangled before us mortals, to encourage us always to be in a state of failure.
Café Philo Discussion, 23 Jan 2008
Reading
"All the best books I have read, were when I was sixteen."
Adam, Participant at a Book Club.
Imagination -- Stephen Fry
"Much of success in life comes from being able to put yourself in the shoes of another: in the shoes of a prince or a pauper, a dictator or a dick-head, a burgomaster or a burger-flipper, regardless of degree, status or esteem, it’s what imagination means – the ability to penetrate the consciousness and experience of another. It’s perhaps the defining characteristic of the artist. So, rather than look at fame from the outside which we can all do (only members of a royal family are born famous after all) try in the following paragraphs to look at fame from the inside. I’m not suggesting this because I think famous people need especial understanding or sympathy, it’s just that I suspect much of what’s written below will make more sense that way. Besides, isn’t it the best way to read anything? Only resentful bores and bitter egoists see everything from their own point of view, surely?"
Let Fame - Blessays, Blogs & Blisquisitions (2007)
Security is the most important thing in life.
"At the turn of the new millennium, the World Bank collected the voices of more than 60,000 poor women and men from 60 countries, in an unprecedented effort to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves.
'Voices of the Poor', chronicles the struggles and aspirations of poor people for a life of dignity. Poor people are the true poverty experts. Poor men and women reveal, in particular, that poverty is multidimensional and complex -- raising new challenges to local, national and global decision-makers. Poverty is voicelessness. It's powerlessness. It's insecurity and humiliation, say the poor across five continents."
Voices of the Poor, World Bank (2000)
The Rose that Never saw a Gardner Die -- Diderot
"If Heraclitus were right, even the constants upon which science depends would have a shelf life. Practically, that might not worry us too much: a landscape does not have to be unchanging for us to be able to find our way about in it. It just has to change slowly, in human terms, so that things are constant enough for us to rely upon them. We may mistake anything that changes this slowly for permanence. (In D'Alembert Dream... Diderot christens this mistake the 'fallacy of the ephemeral', giving the lovely illustration... of the rose who said that as fas as any rose could remember, no gardener had ever died."
Simon Blackburn "Truth" Penguin Books, 2006. p.101
Happiness -- André Gide
"Our happiness, during this last part of the trip, was so untroubled, so calm , that I have nothing to tell about it. The loveliest creations of man are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told."
André Gide "The Immoralist" Bantam Modern Classics, 1970. p.43
A Dull Mind and Inference -- George Eliot
"A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. And Dunstan's mind was a dull as the mind of a possible felon usually is. "
George Eliot "Silas Marner" Everyman's Library: 1993, p.43
The Glue of Meaning -- George Eliot
"..meanin' goes but a little way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? And so I says to mysen, "It isn' the meanin' it's the glue."
George Eliot "Silas Marner" Everyman's Library: 1993, p.56.
Souvenirs of the way we Felt -- Economist
"...they want paper books for what digitisation is revealing them to be. Books are not primarily artefacts, nor necessarily vehicles for ideas. Rather, as Mr Godin puts it, they are "souvenirs of the way we felt" when we read something. That is something that people are likely to go on buying."
The Simple Art of Murder -- Raymond Chandler
"In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers wrote: "It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." And she suggested somewhere else that this is because it is a "literature of escape" and not "a literature of expression." I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers. Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with. As for literature of expression and literature of escape, this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently -- one can never be quite sure -- is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, and not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living."
Antic Past -- Laurie Lee
"The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were still cluttered by spirts and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.
It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know -- the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has a last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew these things and would refer to them impersonal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley -- tree-clumps, corners in woods -- that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in their talk still used these names which are not used now any more. There was also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned."
Laurie Lee Cider with Rosie Penguin: 1974 p.104-5
Mankind's Alternatives -- Pliny
"And Pliny leaves mankind this only alternative; either of doing what deserves to be written, or of writing what deserves to be read."
Lord Chesterfield's Letters
When I Have Ceased to Be -- Andre Gide
"You who will come when I have ceased to hear the noises of this earth and taste its dew upon my lips, it is for you I write these pages; for perhaps you are not sufficiently amazed at being alive; you do no wonder as you should at this astounding miracle of your life."
Rare revolving reads -- Rachel McAlpine
"Charming, neurotic Proust acts on me as a kind of drug. I read a few lines, and drift into a daydream. When ‘reading’ Proust, I spend more time meditating on my own parallel internal experience than actually looking at the words.Online, most of us don’t want a compelling read: we want information fast, or we want to get a job done, fast. But some online content does grab people so they revisit again and again.Games, for instance. And it strikes me that the rare revolving reads involve us in exactly the same way as games do. Reading is never passive, but those rare revolving reads get us actively working, choosing, deciding, comparing, planning, dreaming, and thinking our own thoughts. Like a game does."
Source of Quote - Contented blog
We rationalists are the oppressed minority -- Jon Ronson
"I pause, stare out of the window, and clean my glasses. "They're indicative of a whole New Irrationality sweeping the land," I think. "Yes, that's it. This is a cultural shift I'm identifying. Nowadays everyone's either a conspiracy theorist or a believer in mysticism or the paranormal or a religious zealot. What's happened to the enlightenment? Where is our voice? Nowadays, we rationalists are the oppressed minority."I stare out of the window a bit more. Then I have a very significant thought: "It is time for rational, sceptical people like me to get off the fence and make ourselves known. It is time for us to be publicly and assertively rational."I'm serious. And I know how to do it. I determine that, from this moment forth, whenever I meet someone with irrational beliefs, I'll patiently take the time to sit them down and point out to them why the things they believe are nutty and stupid."
On Design -- Daveybot
"I mean plenty of people think that the deisgn of a computer or a kettle is unimportant, but they're wrong. No, it's not a matter of opinion - they're wrong. A computer screen is the single item I look at more than anything else on the planet - it had damn well better be beautiful. Jonathan Ive deserves a knighthood for his work at Apple if you ask me, and let's not forget that design is about more than appearances. The main reason the iPod is the best mp3 player out there is because it's so frickin intuitive to use, and the same goes for most of their other products too. Ever compared the power draw between an iMac and Dell's or Gateway's simlarly specced offerings? Guess which uses the least - it's the one that's been designed properly."
Dreams of a Final Theory -- Steven Weinberg
"Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy, ' then you can find God in a lump of coal."
All Other Possible Gods -- Stephen Roberts
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
A Teapot Orbiting The Sun -- Bertrand Russell
"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.
If I were to suggest that between Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
Library -- Matthew Battles
"...natural philosophers of the Latin Medieval Ages... held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgm of the three. The notion that words, like plants and stones have existences independent of our uttering them -- that they have power and do things in the world -- is a commonplace in many traditions. Brought together in multitudes, heaped up and pared down, read and forgotten, library books take on lives and histories of thier own, not as texts but as physical objects in the world."
Matthew Battles. Library: an unquiet history Vintage: 2004 (p.10)
Slum Girl -- George Orwell
"She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her -- understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe."
George Orwell. "The Road to Wigan Pier"
The Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
The view from Dawkins' mountain -- Daniel Dennett
"Homo sapiens, is exceptional: of all the species on the planet, it is the only species that has evolved that can understand that it's one of the fruits on the tree of life. We are unique in that regard. It is human language and culture that has made this possible. Not just our brain power, but the fact that we have a division of labor -- because we have language and culture we can fill our brains with the fruits of the labors of everybody else on earth, not merely those who are our ancestors."
Contact: nickluft@gmail.com