Here are some random quotes I wrote down over the last few years.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
Most people don't consider that in choosing their religion, they necessarily reject all the others. Within religions, too, are schisms, which are rejections based on dogma or doctrines. Each group defines themselves more by what they don't believe as by what they do. Those who've converted from one faith to another (or none), and those few who seem to find the good in all religions, are the outliers.And most seem to continue the faith of their families and may rarely have opportunity to question their habits of faith.
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
-David Foster Wallace
That's very wise, I think, and it's a good reminder to not to judge others based on what little you knw of their tastes. I mean, it's still unlikely that most, say, Dancing with the Stars fans would enjoy opera, but that's no reason to feel all superior to them because you do.
In Architecture, as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the Operation. The end is to build well. Well-building hath three Conditions: Commodotie, Firmeness, and Delight.
-Sir Henry Wooten (1642)
It's "Delight" that I enjoy the most about this quote, and it shows that the classic ideas behind design thinking have a long history.
There is a period of time when it is clear
That you have gone wrong
But you continue
Sometimes there is a
Luxurious amount of time
Before anything bad happens
-Jenny Holzer
Holzer creates aphorisms like this in a lot of her work. I'm not sure why I've continued to enjoy this quote so much -- I think I mostly dwell on that period before you know you've gone wrong.
The final one comes from Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Jim and Tom are discussing useful life lessons. Tom tells a story about a man who fell down a chimney and broke hs back -- but he didn't learn a useful lesson, because he couldn't climb chimneys anymore and he didn't have any other backs to break. (I prefer the original wording to the edited and inaccurate versions found all over the web, so I'll quote from the book.)
"But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn`t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn`t ever going to grow dim or doubtful."
-Mark Twain
There is nothing like direct experience.
