Meandering in a dream . . .

Today is the birthday of John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821), poet.

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."
- John Keats

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."
- John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."
- John Keats

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."
- John Keats

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972), poet and critic.

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
- Ezra Pound

"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
- Ezra Pound

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."
- Ezra Pound

"My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. "
- Ezra Pound

"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension."
- Ezra Pound

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
- Ezra Pound

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."
- Ezra Pound

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder."
- Ezra Pound

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Meandering while we wander . . .

Today is the birthday of Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (October 29, 1882 – January 31, 1944), novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright.

"I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life."
- Jean Giraudoux

“A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal”
- Jean Giraudoux

"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
- Jean Giraudoux

"There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people..."
- Jean Giraudoux

"When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome."
- Jean Giraudoux

"It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for."
- Jean Giraudoux

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Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Jonas E. Salk (October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995), medical researcher and virologist. He is best known for his discovery and development of the first safe and effective polio vaccine.

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
- Jonas Salk

"What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other."
- Jonas Salk

"Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else."
- Jonas Salk

"I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams."
- Jonas Salk

“I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.”
- Jonas Salk

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."
- Jonas Salk

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 27/28, 1466/1469, Rotterdam – July 12, 1536, Basel), humanist scholar and philosopher.

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"What is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?"
- Desiderius Erasmus

"I am a citizen of the world, known to all and to all a stranger."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"The desire to write grows with writing."
- Desiderius Erasmus

"Your library is your paradise."
- Desiderius Erasmus

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Today is the birthday of Dylan Marlais Thomas (October 27, 1914 – November 9, 1953), writer and poet.

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
- Dylan Thomas

"He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest."
- Dylan Thomas

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
- Dylan Thomas

"The function of posterity is to look after itself."
- Dylan Thomas

"Somebody's boring me. I think it's me."
- Dylan Thomas

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Meandering in ideas . . .

Today is the birthday of Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970), author, journalist, attorney and lecturer. He is best known for his book, Think and Grow Rich.

"All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea."
- Napoleon Hill

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things!"
- Napoleon Hill

"First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination."
- Napoleon Hill

“Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.”
- Napoleon Hill

"Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."
- Napoleon Hill

"It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."
- Napoleon Hill

"Truly, thoughts are things, and their scope of operation is the world, itself."
- Napoleon Hill

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Meandering along . . .

Today is the birthday of Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998), historian and educator.

"The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought."
- Henry Steele Commager

“History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.”
- Henry Steele Commager

“A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. Free society must fertilize the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.”
- Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."
- Henry Steele Commager
“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
- Henry Steele Commager

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Moss Hart (October 24, 1904 – December 20, 1961), playwright and theatre director.

"All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say No and said Yes. "
- Moss Hart

"Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!"
- Moss Hart

"The only credential the city [New York] asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from."
- Moss Hart

"Boredom is the keynote of poverty . . . for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine."
- Moss Hart

"The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise."
- Moss Hart

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Meander with me . . .

Today is the birthday of John Michael Crichton (October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008), author, producer, director, and screenwriter. Best known as Michael Crichton, his books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide.

"It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear."
- Michael Crichton

"What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question."
- Michael Crichton

"This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine."
- Michael Crichton

"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. "
- Michael Crichton

"Reality is always greater — much greater — than what we know, than whatever we can say about it."
- Michael Crichton

"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."
- Michael Crichton

"It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see."
- Michael Crichton

"No one escapes from life alive."
- Michael Crichton

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Meandering freely . . .

Today is the birthday of Doris May Lessing (born 22 October 1919), writer. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.

"I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common . . . this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it."
- Doris Lessing

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. "
- Doris Lessing

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
- Doris Lessing

"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."
- Doris Lessing

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
- Doris Lessing

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Today is the birthday of Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996), psychologist and writer.

"Turn on, Tune in, Drop out."
- Timothy Leary

"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
- Timothy Leary

"If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people."
- Timothy Leary

"Our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos..."
- Timothy Leary

"We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history... The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go."
- Timothy Leary

"Think for yourself and question authority."
- Timothy Leary

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Meandering on the path . . .

Today is the birthday of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (born October 21, 1929), author, She is best known for writing science fiction and fantasy.

"The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
- Ursula K. Le Guin

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Meandering on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952), philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer.

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."
- John Dewey

"Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
- John Dewey

"A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive."
- John Dewey

"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action."
- John Dewey

"Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself."
- John Dewey

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."
- John Dewey

"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
- John Dewey

"To me faith means not worrying."
- John Dewey

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Meandering while we wander . . .

Today is the birthday of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), author of espionage novels. He is best known by his pen name, John le Carré.

"The only reward for love is the experience of loving."
- John le Carré

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."
- John le Carré

"History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose."
- John le Carré

"No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn."
- John le Carré

"Sometimes we do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions not answers."
- John le Carré

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Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Henri-Louis Bergson (October 18, 1859 – January 4, 1941), philosopher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
- Henri Bergson

"I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment."
- Henri Bergson

"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause."
- Henri Bergson

"There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation."
- Henri Bergson

"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
- Henri Bergson

"Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality."
- Henri Bergson

"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
- Henri Bergson

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Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005), playwright and essayist. In 1949, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

“I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.”
- Arthur Miller

"Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, What do you do? And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day."
- Arthur Miller

“The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes”
- Arthur Miller

"There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad."
- Arthur Miller

"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."
- Arthur Miller

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted”
- Arthur Miller

“Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.”
- Arthur Miller

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Meandering to and fro . . .

Today is the birthday of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900), playwright, poet and author.

"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."
- Oscar Wilde

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
- Oscar Wilde

"Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
- Oscar Wilde

"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
- Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
- Oscar Wilde

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."
- Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much."
- Oscar Wilde

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Meandering in thought . . .

Today is the birthday of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900), philosopher.

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975), political theorist and philosopher.

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."
- Hannah Arendt

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
- Hannah Arendt

"Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight."
- Hannah Arendt

“Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”
- Hannah Arendt

"Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses."
- Hannah Arendt

"This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes."
- Hannah Arendt

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."
- Hannah Arendt

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Meandering we go on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870 – August 19, 1945), author, educational theorist, and social critic.

"The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests — if you try to feed it with a shovel you get bad results."
- Albert J. Nock

"Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does; or that his soul might die without his knowing it?"
- Albert J. Nock

"Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning."
- Albert J. Nock

"The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important."
- Albert J. Nock

"Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect — nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time."
- Albert J. Nock

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Meandering on the path . . .

Today is the birthday of Edward Aleister Crowley (October 12, 1875 – December 1, 1947), occultist, mystic, poet, and social provocateur. He is best known as Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast and for his development of the philosophical system called Thelema.

"The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript."
- Aleister Crowley

"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach."
- Aleister Crowley

"Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics."
- Aleister Crowley

"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
- Aleister Crowley

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
- Aleister Crowley

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Meandering along . . .

Today is the birthday of François Mauriac (October 11, 1885 – September 1, 1970), novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and journalist. He was elected a member of the Académie française in 1933. François Mauriac received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952 and the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958.

"There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related."
- François Mauriac

"Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures."
- François Mauriac

“Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.”
- François Mauriac

"No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever."
- François Mauriac

"To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others."
- François Mauriac

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Meandering, meandering, meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of James Clavell (October 10, 1924 – September 7, 1994), novelist, screenwriter, and director. He is best known for his Asian Saga series of novels.

"All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning."
- James Clavell

"To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline and training is all about."
- James Clavell

"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world, and the most dangerous."
- James Clavell

"The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox."
- James Clavell

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Meandering freely . . .

Today is the birthday of John Winston Ono Lennon (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980), singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of the musical group, The Beatles.

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known."
- John Lennon

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality."
- John Lennon

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"
- John Lennon

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."
- John Lennon

"Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one."
- John Lennon

"All we are saying is give peace a chance."
- John Lennon

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Meandering in the sand . . .

Today is the birthday of Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986), science fiction author. He is best known for his Dune novels.

"The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand."
- Frank Herbert

"Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck."
- Frank Herbert

"When a wise man does not understand, he says: I do not understand. The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom."
- Frank Herbert

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
- Frank Herbert

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
- Frank Herbert

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."
- Frank Herbert

"It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich."
- Frank Herbert

"The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."
- Frank Herbert

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Giddly meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Niels Henrik David Bohr ( October 7, 1885 – November 18, 1962), physicist. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. Niels Bohr has been described as one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century.

"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
- Niels Bohr

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
- Niels Bohr

"Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it."
- Niels Bohr

“If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.”
- Niels Bohr

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
- Niels Bohr

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
- Niels Bohr

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Glen David Brin (born October 6, 1950), scientist and science fiction author. He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards.

"Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on."
- David Brin

"Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us."
- David Brin

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
- David Brin

"Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error."
- David Brin

" A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original."
- David Brin

"Change is the very fabric of our time."
- David Brin

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Meandering in knowledge . . .

Today is the birthday of Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784), philosopher, art critic, and writer.

Here is another writer whose works have been burned -in 1749 Denis Diderot’s book Pensées philosophiques was burned by the public hangman.

"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."
- Denis Diderot

“In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.”
- Denis Diderot

"One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures."
- Denis Diderot

“There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.”
- Denis Diderot

"We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."
- Denis Diderot

"Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things."
- Denis Diderot

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Meandering in change . . .

Today is the birthday of Alvin Toffler (born October 4, 1928 in New York City), writer and futurist.

"Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life."
- Alvin Toffler

"Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."
- Alvin Toffler

"You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction."
- Alvin Toffler

"One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition."
- Alvin Toffler

"It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution."
- Alvin Toffler

"Knowledge is the most democratic source of power."
- Alvin Toffler

"Change is the process by which the future invades our lives."
- Alvin Toffler

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Meander with me . . .

Today is the birthday of Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938), novelist, writer, and playwright.

"Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you."
- Thomas Wolfe

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
- Thomas Wolfe

"You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity."
- Thomas Wolfe

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."
- Thomas Wolfe

"Life isn't boring, people are small and let life escape them."
- Thomas Wolfe

"Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind."
- Thomas Wolfe

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Meandering we go on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955), lawyer, businessman and Modernist poet.

"After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun."
- Wallace Stevens

"The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things."
- Wallace Stevens

"I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me."
- Wallace Stevens

"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."
- Wallace Stevens

"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. "
- Wallace Stevens

"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."
- Wallace Stevens

"The first idea was not our own."
- Wallace Stevens

Stevens image source (1)

Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004), historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. Daniel J. Boorstin was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987.

"Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know."
- Daniel J. Boorstin

"Artists and writers, I believe, have a special role, creating new questions for which they offer experimental answers. We are tested, enriched, and fulfilled by the varieties of experience. And as the years pass there are increasing advantages to being a questioner. Answers can trouble us by their inconsistency, but there is no such problem with questions. I am not obliged to hang on to earlier questions, and there can be no discord - only growth - between then and now. Learning, I have found, is a way of becoming inconsistent with my past self. I believe in vocation, a calling for reasons we do not understand to do whatever we discover we can do."
- Daniel J. Boorstin

"We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions."
- Daniel J. Boorstin

"Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion. "
- Daniel J. Boorstin

"Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge."
- Daniel J. Boorstin

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge."
- Daniel J. Boorstin

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