Daily Quotes

A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in.

(If only more people viewed the world this way.)

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Richard Feynman

Dedicated to all uncivilized beer drinkers out there

19 minutes ago, SuperG.Girl said:

Dedicated to all uncivilized beer drinkers out there

   

And it would be exactly the same if it said "a glass of beer"

Plus! Beer was a catalyst for civilization... unlike the oh so decadent wine

“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”

Frank Zappa

"Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of ideas,

but rather it is a copy of the will itself,

whose objectivity the ideas are.

This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating

than the other arts.  They speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself"

Schopenhauer

By this statement Schopenhauer is referring to how other artforms- eg. visual, literary, etc. are "representations" of the will, while music alone is the will itself.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell

"Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein."

Dick Rowe of Decca Records to Brian Epstein when he rejected signing The Beatles

"The past lies ahead of us"

Heidegger

to philosophize is to learn to die

Montaigne 

1 hour ago, Cult Icon said:

to philosophize is to learn to die

 

Montaigne 

One of the professors that I learned philosophy from considered this to be one of the best definitions of philosophy.

16 hours ago, Enrico_sw said:

 

One of the professors that I learned philosophy from considered this to be one of the best definitions of philosophy.

This is the name of one of his essays.  Palliative care, Buddhism and stoicism embodies this. 

Human beings cannot take too much reality

TS Eliot, Four quartets - Burnt Norton

My favorite quote of the year is "All is vanity", from Ecclesiastes 1:2.

I find myself repeating it in my head quite often these days.

go forth boldly into your future

death is not the end

 . . A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets

 . . Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream

TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday

"The most important achievement that a human being can attain is to learn to understand because to understand is to be free."

Spinoza

"Life sucks, then you die"  -  Stephen King from Pet Sematary

Death Poem of Hanabusa Ikkei 1843

I thought to live two centuries, or three

yet here comes death to me,

a child just eighty-five years old.