“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” To which a befuddled Alice replies, “The question is…whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." Originated from Proverbs 17:18 ("Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.")
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that is all." And speaking as an Australian rereading Terry Pratchett's "The Last Continent", this is hilarious ... and now I have an earworm. “Once a moderately jolly wizard camped by a dried-up waterhole under the shade of a tree that he was completely unable to identify. And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer, saying ‘What kind of idiots put beer in tins?’” For me it twigged when Rincewind, of all people, was described as jolly. Even moderately jolly. Still ... no worries, eh?
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Socrates, according to Plato, remarked to Meno: “I would contend … that we will be better [people], braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.”
Exactly. To put it more succinctly, if not as eloquently: question everything, do your own research, and if someone else's story sounds like bullshit, don't take their word for it.
“[T[here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.
Yes. Margaret Hungerford expressed a similar sentiment in her book, Molly Bawn (1878): "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Seemingly simple, but deeply nuanced. Shakespeare put it in another way: "Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye" (Love's Labours Lost). But my favorite rendition came from Miss Piggy who said: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary -- from time to time -- to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye!" (Haiii-yah!)
"Many people hear voices when there is no one there. Some of them are called 'mad' and shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called 'writers' and they pretty much do the same thing." Ray Bradbury.
Which echoes one of my favorite quotes by Richard Feynman: "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." It's the approach to things that one does not know that leads to advances in science. Isaac Asimov once said something to the effect that great progress in science is marked not by somebody saying "Eureka" but by somebody looking at the data and saying "That's funny..." I ran that by a friend of mine who was on the short list for a Nobel Prize in geochemistry. He said, "Absolutely."
"[A]n important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: This is how things are." Oliver Burkeman. Upon reading that, I recalled one high school afternoon when I sudden storm came up as we were walking home after school, a two-mile walk (few kids had cars in those days and none of us) and I got so wet that that my clothes were soggy and the ink on my bus-pass in my front shirt pocket was runny. I have rarely felt so free.
Hmm. I'm reminded of a time, years and years ago, when I was unemployed and looking for work. I was on a train, in a suit and tie, heading for a job interview. Before I go on: the day was moderately warm (about 25 C, or 77 F), but the humidity was 100%. It was simply bucketing down. That's probably one of the things you really don't want when you're on the way to a job interview. Anyway, I had an umbrella and I got there just fine, but of course I was soaked to the skin and fairly uncomfortable. The interviewer took one look at me in my rumpled suit, sniggered, and said "Fall in a river, did you?" Grr. After the understandable annoyance, I felt similarly free. What did I care if I didn't get this job, if it meant not working for an jerk like that. Besides, even if they said no, so what? There are plenty of jobs. I didn't have to be desperate and grab the first one I got offered, if it meant working for an asshat. Pardon my small tirade. Back to our usual programming.
How true. On the rare occasions when I went for a job interview, I made it clear that not only was the company interviewing me, but I was interviewing the company. I laid my cards on the table, saying "This is what I have to offer, and you know it's what you need. The real question is: how willing are you to accept my employment on my terms as well as yours?" Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. But, like you, I never felt like I was the one being cheated or had conceded control of the situation.
"To be any more than all I am would be a lie." Marty Balin, Jefferson Airplane, "Today" on the album, Surrealistic Pillow (1967).
"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." (Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde)
Currently: And I hate that you think that I'm weak 'cause I don't wanna let you know (I'm gonna build castleeeees)
"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" (my best friend"s (late) gorgeous wife used to say this jokingly) (Kelly LeBrock....Pantene commercial)
"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." --Gustave Flaubert
These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons. ~ Anne Enright
"Oh what burdens we bear for troubles yet to be" (Me)....rewording a Thomas Jefferson quote: "How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."
"On a journey in Tibet, it is traditional to stop and look back, to see how far we have come. Pausing and reviewing our accomplishment strengthens our resolve to keep going." Sakyong Mipham.
