January 2012
2 posts
2 tags
1 tag
The Rules of a Creator's Life
beingblog:
A fine list of rules from creativesomething to consider and contemplate on this gorgeous Saturday winter morning. Non?
Click to view a tad‒bit larger. And share with your friends, co‒workers, and creative icons.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding,...”
– Baruch Spinoza
October 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Darden’s Hall
from “Work in...
1 tag
A Long Knight’s Dream
from “The...
2 tags
“Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world...”
– The Ancient Sage
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
“All information looks like noise until you break the code.”
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
(Corrected wording 25SEP2011)
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the...”
– Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
October 2010
2 posts
1 tag
The Unprovable Liar
‘What I am saying cannot be proved.’
Suppose this statement can be proved. Then what it says must be true. But it says it cannot be proved. If we assume it can be proved, we prove it cannot be proved. So our supposition that it was provable is wrong. With that road closed to us, let’s try the only other one available — let’s suppose it cannot be proved. Since that is precisely what it...
Consultation
A letter from Lewis Carroll to 14-year-old Wilton Rix:
Understanding you to be a distinguished algebraist (i.e. distinguished from other algebraists by different face, different height, etc.), I beg to submit to you a difficulty which distresses me much.
If x and y are each equal to ’1,’ it is plain that 2 × (x2 – y2) = 0, and also that 5 × (x – y) = 0.
Hence 2 × (x2 – y2) = 5 × (x –...
September 2010
9 posts
1 tag
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our...”
– Mark Twain
“People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my...”
– Søren Kierkegaard
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought...”
– Søren Kierkegaard
“If you remember how much easier it is to remember what you would rather forget...”
– – Elmira Gazette, quoted in New York Times, Feb. 13, 1891
reblogged from futilitycloset
2 tags
Everyone is your teacher...
“Everyone you meet and everything you have becomes valuable to you. Dogen said, ‘Everyone is your master, don’t pay any attention to whether they are a layman or priest, a woman or man, young or old. Everyone is your teacher and your friend, but as long as you discriminate this from that, you will not meet a Zen master.’” - Shunryu Suzuki reblogged from Whiskey...
2 tags
Cat in an Empty Apartment
Die—you can’t do that to a cat. Since what can a cat do in an empty apartment? Climb the walls? Rub up against the furniture? Nothing seems different here, but nothing is the same. Nothing has been moved, but there’s more space. And at nighttime no lamps are lit. Footsteps on the staircase, but they’re new ones. The hand that puts fish on the saucer has changed, too. Something...
2 tags
People Like Us
There are more like us. All over the world There are confused people, who can’t remember The name of their dog when they wake up, and people Who love God but can’t remember where He was when they went to sleep. It’s All right. The world cleanses itself this way. A wrong number occurs to you in the middle Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time To save the house. And the second-story man...
2 tags
Three Oddest Words
Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no nonbeing can hold.
Wislawa Szymborska
2 tags
“I have always imagined that Heaven would be some kind of library.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
August 2010
1 post
1 tag
It's a Small World After All
Astronomy Picture of the Day, August 3, 2010 via Wiskey River
July 2010
5 posts
2 tags
“There are seconds, they only come five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
2 tags
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for...”
– Umberto Eco
3 tags
“Few people have the imagination for reality”
– Goethe
3 tags
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
– Albert Einstein
June 2010
6 posts
2 tags
“The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting...”
– Peter Abelard
3 tags
“Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience. Sometimes you don’t need the...”
– Amish proverb
3 tags
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
2 tags
AuReality →
A musical friend.
3 tags
“We can make our minds so like clear water that beings gather around us, that...”
– William Butler Yeats
2 tags
“If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
May 2010
13 posts
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is...”
– Aldous Huxley
1 tag
“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they lead to actions....”
– From the Upanishads
Group Study →
From Greg Ross’ blog Futility Closet
2 tags
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated...”
– G.K. Chesterton
3 tags
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard →
From the Spring 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Interesting discussion of plot.
2 tags
Clone Wars →
Comic on reddit.com. Hover over the image and click to enlarge.
3 tags
To Make a Dadist Poem
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you...
2 tags
“You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”
– Timothy Leary
1 tag
“We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”
– Li Po
1 tag
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let...”
– Henry David Thoreau
3 tags
“The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words...”
– Chuang Tzu
1 tag
“Words are like children…the more care you lavish on them, the more they...”
– From the script of the film Luther. Spoken by Joseph Fiennes as Martin Luther.
2 tags
Playing in the Void
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we really hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the...
April 2010
6 posts
2 tags
“Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the...”
– Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing
3 tags
The Joy of Writing →
Poem by Wislawa Szymborska
1 tag
“You have to unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”
– Jack Gilbert, quoted by Silvia Curbelo, The Great Elsewhere: Writing Beyond the Desk, American Review of Poetry, Nov/Dec 2007, pg. 33
2 tags
“[The] sophists [thought] judgments were based on nomos (convention), which in...”
– Footnote by George Kennedy in excerpt of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Professional Writing and Rhetoric, ch 1, pg 25
Questions
“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
2 tags
Everything and Nothing
“There is so much of Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely” - from the poem “Reality Demands” by Polish poet Wisawa Szymborska