#lab

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place. ↗

— Kevin Brockmeier

#music #sleep #song #music

Labels bias our perceptions, thinking, and behavior. A label or story can either separate us from, or connect us to, nature. For our health and happiness, we must critically evaluate our labels and stories by their effects. ↗

— Michael J. Cohen

#ecology #health #labels #nature #psychology

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#greeks #labor #slavery #work #age

here lies a stupid son of a bitch who tried to make Death a company cop ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#death

Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#manners #hurt

Everything, in the end, comes down to timing. One second, one minute, one hour could make all the difference. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#different

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#names #war #president

Money is the great tool through whose means labor and skill become universally co-operative. ↗

— Leland Stanford

#co-operative #great #labor #means #money

Can we just call them storm spirits?” Leo asked. “Venti makes them sound like evil espresso drinks. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#leo #lost-hero #spirit

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#carbohydrates #diabesity #dr-hyman #dr-robert-lustig #labor