Post a random quote from a book you're reading

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Trogluddite
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15 Oct 2018, 5:44 pm

Leonardo da Vinci wrote:
It has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may be desired to have it stimulated it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own without permission or any thought of its owner. Whether one is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature often has a life and intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it; that which he seeks to cover and hide he ought to expose solemnly like a priest at mass.

Excerpt from Serge Bramly's Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Read in The Faber Book of Science edited by John Carey.

I'll let you guess for yourselves what Leonardo da Vinci was talking about there! :wink:


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15 Oct 2018, 7:10 pm

"I use the surest means...
To snare my victims!!"


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traven
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21 Oct 2018, 1:24 am

Le véritable savant met vingt bonnes années en moyenne à effectuer la grande découverte, celle qui consiste à se convaincre que le délire des uns ne fait pas du tout le bonheur des autres et que chacun ici-bas se trouve indisposé par la marotte du voisin.
The true scientist takes on average twenty good years to make the great discovery, which consists in convincing oneself that the delusions of some does not make the happiness of others at all and that everyone here below is indisposed by the foolishness of the neighbor.
- Voyage au bout de la nuit
or to level it with an oldie:
“My benefactor used to say that a warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one.”
~Don Juan~



IsabellaLinton
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28 Oct 2018, 1:16 am

The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her nonetheless because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


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sidetrack
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02 Nov 2018, 8:37 pm

Quote:
"It is an almost infinte task to describe the manifold forms in which the humanist types of faith has expressed itself

and is alive in large sections of the Western world and in Asiatic cultures. If we apply it to the distinction we have

applied to the religious types of faith, the distinction between the ontological and the moral type, we can say that the

ontological type of secular faith is romatic-conservative, the moral type is progressive-utopian. The word "romantic,"

in this context, points to the experience of the infinte in the finte, as it is given in nature and history. The word

"conservative" in connection with romantic emphasizes the experience of the presence of the ultimate in existing

forms of nature and history. If a man sees the holy in the flower as it grows, in the animal as it moves, in man as he

represents a unique individuality, in a special nation, a special culture, a special social system, he is romantic-

conservative. For him the given is holy and is the content of his ultimate concern. The analogy of this kind of faith to

the sacramental faith is obvious. The romantic-conservative type of humanist faith is secularized sacramental faith:

the divine is given here and now. All cultural and political conservatism is derived from this type of secular faith. It is

faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate which it presupposes. Its weakness and its danger is that it may

become empty. History has shown this weakness and final emptiness of all merely secular cultures. It has turned

them back again and again to the relgious forms of faith from which they came.


The dynamics of faith by Paul Tillich, pg.64



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03 Nov 2018, 1:29 am

-“There's no tyrant like a brain. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night


-“Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn't work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "Your pretty, Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle..." ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

8) 8) don't you wonder why we are supposed to think 'normal' people make sense and know what they're doing



sidetrack
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04 Nov 2018, 2:43 pm

Quote:
Countless sicknesses have been cure, lives made whole, and despairing hearts mended; yet in this optimistic program

of do-it-yourself redemption there is something that seems, paradoxically, to vitiate prayer. All too easily, prayers

that are pure alleluia and no miserere collapse into a dull monotone. All too easily, the dialogue between I

and Thou becomes a monologue between I and Me. All too easily, the spirituality of thoughts as forces shrinks down

to a psychology of self-hypnosis. The God within, who is always on call, is not nearly as evocative as the God without,

whose face is sometimes hidden. Even great mystics such as Ramana Maharshi and Sri Ramakrishna experienced, in

the midst of their union with the divine, the mystery of God's awful and wonderful otherness. Healing prayer is an

inestimatable gift; but prayer that is therapeutized surely lacks the resources to sustain a flourishing religious culture

like that of the Navajo or the crofters of the Carmina Gadelica.


Eventually one tires of oneself, even of one's higher Self. It avails much to pray, but when it becomes no

more than a self-help technique, the adventure of prayer is over.


--Prayer: a history by Philip and Carol Zaleski, pgs.329-330



IsabellaLinton
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11 Nov 2018, 7:19 pm

"My hypocrisy keeps me warm, as does my cloak of disappointment".

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley

LOLLLL :heart:


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AprilR
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12 Nov 2018, 10:40 am

I'm not reading this right now but i liked the book at the time and the preamble stayed with me:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe"

From a Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick



IsabellaLinton
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12 Nov 2018, 10:44 am

AprilR wrote:
I'm not reading this right now but i liked the book at the time and the preamble stayed with me:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe"

From a Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick


(wow) 8O


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AprilR
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12 Nov 2018, 10:48 am

^It made me really sad. The book was like a biography of the author and took place in the 70s where the people in question used a lot of drugs. They were his friends, some of them died some of them were left with brain damage, and he dedicated the book to his friends.



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15 Nov 2018, 3:52 pm

Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism: essays by various autistics


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23 Nov 2018, 1:23 pm

Bruno Latour's Down to Earth, a book about climate change and ways to conceptualize what's going on in the world, begins with this quote:

"we've read enough books" - Jared Kushner


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23 Nov 2018, 3:43 pm

Quote:
I decided not to tell them this because (A) it didn’t seem like an intelligent thing to know, and (B) it would probably seem odd that I know such freakish facts about an actress I had just said I didn’t really like.


“Quiet, please” by Scott Douglas, pg.9.



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03 Dec 2018, 11:42 am

"For how can a man stand, unless he has something sure under his feet? Can a man tread the unstable water all his life and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once. Upon what could he stand, save upon a woman? Was he then like the old man of the seas, impotent to move save upon the back of another life? Was he impotent, or a cripple, or a defective, or a fragment? It was black, mad, shameful torture, the frenzy of fear, the frenzy of desire, and the horrible, gasping back-wash of regret".

The Rainbow, DH Lawrence (Oxford World's Classics, 1915)


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03 Dec 2018, 10:08 pm

Not from a book but important

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/arash-sha ... _23200391/

Quote:
Unlike John Maynard Keynes' utopian forecast in the 1930s, technological advancements have fallen short of delivering 15-hour work weeks and stretches of uninterrupted leisure.