#ode

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released. ↗

— Jean Houston

#extraordinary #released #us #waiting #within

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it. ↗

— Jean Baudrillard

#new-york #postmodern #power #dreams

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#culture #education #ethics #foundations #justice

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#culture #education #modern-society #post-modernism #society

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#commodities #equality #just #man #mass

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#fruit #impatience #modernity #equality

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#dating #dating-advice #internet #men-and-women #modern-life

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#humour #jeeves #jeeves-and-wooster #wodehouse #wooster

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics. ↗

— Daniel C. Dennett

#multiple-drafts-model #qualia #experience

Listen and learn: you need fourteen characters, minimum. Use random letters, not words. Here’s a tip: think of a sentence, and use the first letter in each of those words. Mix it up between upper and lower case. Then pick two numbers that mean something to you – not dates – and stick them somewhere between the letters. Put a punctuation mark at the beginning of the password and then a symbol, like a dollar sign, at the end. ↗

— Julie James

#julie-james #kyle-rhodes #rylann-pierce #dating