#ace

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#christianity #russell #space #teapot #age

You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#aging-gracefully #age

What are you doing here anyway?" "Here as in your bedroom, or here as in the great, spiritual question of our purpose on this planet? If you're asking whether it's all just a cosmic coincidence or there's a greater metaethical purpose to life, well, that's a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious arguement, but – ” “I'm going back to bed. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#city-of-bones #clary-fray #jace-wayland #age

Trust is to human relationships what faith is to gospel living. It is the beginning place, the foundation upon which more can be built. Where trust is, love can flourish. ↗

— Barbara Smith

#beginning #built #faith #flourish #foundation

People have told me 'Betty, Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with old friends...' .. At my age, if I wanted to keep in touch with old friends, I'd need a Ouija board ↗

— Betty White

#humor #old-age #old-friends #age

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older. ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#future #life #place #time #age

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

The Bronze Age was such a third-place era.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#era #nonsense #third-place #age

It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste. ↗

— Marguerite Duras

#aging-gracefully #age

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72). ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#getting-older #old-age #age