I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Month: January 2006
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Bernard Berenson
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Robert Graves
Like Snow
She, then, like snow in a dark night,
Fell secretly. And the world waked
With dazzling of the drowsy eye,
So that some muttered ‘Too much light’,
And drew the curtains close.
Like snow, warmer than fingers feared,
And to soil friendly;
Holding the histories of the night
In yet unmelted tracks.
Edward Abbey
Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you – beyond the next turning of the canyon walls.
Antonio Porchia
Certainties are arrived at only on foot.
A A Milne
Outdoor Hum For Snowy Weather
The more it snows
(Tiddely pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddely pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddely pom),
On snowing.
And nobody knows
(Tiddely pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddely pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddely pom),
Are growing.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Ani Difranco
Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.
C S Lewis
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
Don Paterson
There was no point dedicating myself to besting the rival suitors. Unlike them – superior to them – I knew her real worth; I spent my time looking over my shoulder for Odysseus.
Shel Silverstein
In Search of Cinderella
From dusk to dawn,
From town to town,
Without a single clue,
I seek the tender, slender foot
To fit this crystal shoe.
From dusk to dawn,
I try it on
Each damsel that I meet.
And I still love her so, but oh,
I’ve started hating feet.
The Square Root of Two
The Square Root of Two cannot be expressed as a ratio between two integers; that is it is an irrational number.
Proof
Let us assume the converse that the Square Root of two can be expressed as the ratio of two numbers a and b. In that case there must be an a and b which are not both even as if they are both even we get the same ratio by dividing each by two until at least one of them is odd. Therefore if
a/b = SQRT (2) then
a2/b2 = 2
a2= 2b2 and
so a2 is even and therefore a is even; so
a=2c for some c . Thus
a2= (2c)2 and
a2 = 4c2
2b2 = 4c2
b2 = 2c2
So b2 is even and therefore b is even.
Therefore a and b are both even which is a contradiction.
Therefore the Square Root of Two cannot be expressed as the ratio between two integers.
QED.
Abraham Lincoln
Things come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
Niels Bohr
Of course I don’t believe in it. [pointing to horseshoe on his office wall] But I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.
Philip Larkin
The North Ship
Legend
I saw three ships go sailing by,
Over the sea, the lifting sea,
And the wind rose in the morning sky,
And one was rigged for a long journey.
The first ship turned towards the west,
Over the sea, the running sea,
And by the wind was all possessed
And carried to a rich country.
The second ship turned towards the east,
Over the sea, the quaking sea,
And the wind hunted it like a beast
To anchor in captivity.
The third ship drove towards the north,
Over the sea, the darkening sea,
But no breath of wind came forth,
And the decks shone frostily.
The northern sky rose high and black
Over the proud unfruitful sea,
East and west the ships came back
Happily or unhappily:
But the third went wide and far
Into an unforgiving sea
Under a fire-spilling star,
And it was rigged for a long journey.
William R Inge
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he’s born.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
Roger McGough
Time Flies
We’re led to believe
But it’s us that fly
Time sits on its hands
As we rush by
C S Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? I thought I was the only one.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I find the great thing in this world is, not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Good Manners
A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.
Irwin Corey
If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.
T S Eliot
The Journey of the Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Always do what you are afraid to do.
A Pragmatic Diet
I eat my peas with honey,
I’ve done it all my life,
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Carl Sagan
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
G K Chesterton
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
Eric Hoffer
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.