Your favorite quotes: 2011 edition

[superboyac]

I'm liking quotes more and more, and explanations less and less.  Post away everyone...the more profound the better!

"…we can distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. You can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined as sciences do the intellect. But of course it’s nonsense to think of the scientist as a cold unemotional reasoned and the artist as somebody who’s in a perpetual emotional tizzy. You can’t distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very close together, psychologically and otherwise.

Still, the fact that they start from opposite ends, even if they do meet in the middle, makes for one important difference between them. Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he’s not so great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they’ll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama is concerned; so is Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures. Social conditions may improve: most of us would rather live in the nineteenth-century United States than in the thirteenth-century Italy, and for most of us Whitman’s celebration of democracy makes a lot more sense than Dante’s Inferno. But it doesn’t follow that Whitman is a better poet than Dante: literature won’t line up with that kind of improvement."
--Northrope Frye

[superboyac]

Quoting Oscar Wilde is akin to cheating...nevertheless:

A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.

[mouser]

This might be a good time to plug my PopUp Wisdom program:

[superboyac]

Sweet!  I totally remember that from a long time ago!  Yeah, I'm definitely using that since I'm collecting quotes now.

[rgdot]

You should update that to tweet quotes straight from the program </kidding>

[mouser]

And while i'm pimping my own programs, I should also add Multi Photo Quotes, the (multimonitor) screensaver that shows quotes and photos:

[mouser]

And if you want to search for the perfect quote quickly, you can try my PopQuotes plugin for Find and Run Robot:


All 3 of these programs can read the same quote "book" files, which support standard fortune file formats and other formats, and include several big quote files and find others on the web.

[rjbull]

Are obituaries OK?

Two from John Hillaby's book Journey through Britain:

---

Him as was
Has gone from we;
Us as is
Must go to he.

---

A rather weary degree of respect:

Here lies the body of Mary Arnott
Born a virgin, died a harlot.
Until age fifteen she kept her virginity,
Which is a record in this vicinity.

---

Two obituaries written by the men themselves.
First, from Lord Berners, a minor British intellectual and composer of the early Twentieth Century:

Here lies Berners,
One of the learners.
His love of learning
May earn him a burning,
But thanks to the Lord!
He seldom was bored.

There's a shortened version on the Wikipedia page.

---

And a barbed one by the author Kyril Bonfiglioli:

Loved and respected by all who knew him slightly.

It's worth looking at the onward link to Kyril Bonfiglioli's Wikiquotes page.

[app103]

I have been collecting tea tags. The brand my daughter drinks reads like a traditional fortune cookie. Mine have a sense of humor.