Eric S notapenguin's blog: "Quotes"

Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon -- he'd run them all. (Editor's note: this takes some context before it's actually funny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld , maybe...)

No parking, mall mimes I guess the circus troupe will have to go another few blocks.

The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. (from a speech by Satan - lines 251-3 I think?- during the Fall, in Paradise Lost: Book I (1667) (using http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/lost/pl1.html as my source); may not reflect exactly the author's own opinions in consequence, though I suspect these lines do.)

I was going to include here a paragraph something written in 1930 and which would just pass under the 75-year rule if applied to writings (77...) (published in a book Though Gently by Laura Riding, the Seizin Press, 1930, in Deyá, Majorca and found by me quoted in Sorabji: A Critical Celebration published some sixty-five years later. Paraphrase seems warranted by copyright law instead ;) but if you can find the original - in the book on Sorabji (edited by Rapoport, Paul, ed. published by Scolar, Press: Aldershot, Hampshire, UK on page 195) I think the quote- under Preliminaries - will please and give pause-for-thought. This is really not about active intentional lying but the triage, selection, needed by writers of biographers, nonfiction writers, fiction writers of course. Paraphrase then, paraphrasing then, trying to keep some of the spirit if not Riding's poetry... or concision -- If we must choose then, we must leave out, and how much may we- before we are no longer truth-telling? If we go so quickly on, speed on as though everything were being left to the side in the rush, we may not omit anything. If we go slow, telling a tale and not an inventory, then much. "Gently omitting, though gently."

It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

from Sanctuary, (1903) part II, ch. IV (often rendered by me in a partial paraphrase but this is the original... with thanks to friend Amoux- over on another site- for mentioning this quote in the first place.)

"The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe * *Maximen und Reflexionen, Nach den Handschriften des Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, edited by Max Hecker. Goethe-Gesellschaft, Weimar, pub. 1907. No. 911, page 166. Quoted in Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years: 1848-1861, Cornell University Press: 1989, 1993 softcover edition, ISBN 0-8014-9721-3, chapter heading on page 112.

"... proof is ritual, and a celebration of the power of pure reason. Such an exercise in reassurance may be very necessary in view of all the messes that clear thinking clearly gets us into." - Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, p. 151, Birkhauser Boston edition, 1980 "...logic is only the art of going wrong with confidence." - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), The modern temper; a study and a confession - New York: Harcourt, Brace (1929, repub. 1956). (The university library here - Cornell's - has this book, which I haven't yet read, so I may be able to insert the page number soon; I used en.wikiquote.org for the source.)

a post from the PenguinBlog here, which needs to be made easier to find. (Apologies to King Nothing though, whose comment was appreciated and is lost thereby...) -- (Erich Fromm, quoted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited {Harper & Row Perennial Library 1965 republication of 1958 original, paperback, p.21}): (Fromm) "Many of them are normal because they are so well-adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." (Huxley: ) They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.