#common

Stay in the boat, I told myself, watching them walk up to the pavilion. I'll just stay in the boat. I won't go anywhere near that creature. But in spite of that wise warning, I climbed out of the boat. Fine, stretch your legs, I told myself. Just don't follow them. But of course, I followed them. You are without question your own worst enemy, I scolded myself, even as I tiptoed after them. ↗

— Merrie Haskell

#curiousity #common-sense

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean. Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass. We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in — and we made Superman, after all. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#intelligence

Land began to be seen as something to be owned privately and exploited for private interests, and never was entirely reconciled with the old ideas that land should be utilized in common for the good of all. ↗

— Neil Abercrombie

#common #entirely #exploited #good #ideas

Affairs are easier of entrance than of exit; and it is but common prudence to see our way out before we venture in. ↗

— Aesop

#before #common #easier #entrance #exit

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations. ↗

— Kofi Annan

#common #destiny #ever #face #friends

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting. ↗

— David Antin

#centuries #circles #commonplace #like #literary

It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished. ↗

— Norman Ralph Augustine

#achieve #cost #degradation #each #expensive

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#different #expressions #manifestations #nothing #order

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#commonly #fairer #foulest #life #much

So there's always been this clash between what is the public good - that which belongs to all of us in common - and what can be exploited for a private interest. ↗

— Neil Abercrombie

#been #belongs #between #clash #common